In some full-text resources, full-text means exactly that: only the text. In other cases, charts and graphs are only available for viewing and not for printing, or downloading. If they are available for printing, then issues related to printer access capable of supporting charts, photos and graphs need to be considered.

For example, to do a search in a full-text version of the journal Science that only covers 1993 to date could result in incomplete information for your purposes. Moreover, if the search does not include errata or corrections it could result in false assumptions and incorrect data. As in many things, easiest may not be best.

Basic searching in many full-text databases does not include searching within the complete document for your search words. You must specify that you wish to scan the complete text. If you do this, you should be aware of the implications, including a search that may result in thousands of hits. Check the database search instructions to see how your search query is being executed and what your options are in searching.  Contact a librarian if you need further help.

Most full-text databases support the basic search features of non full-text or bibliographic databases. This includes the use of Boolean operators and and or, as well as the ability limit the search to specific fields (such as title). But because of the nature of full-text databases more complex search capabilities are often available and necessary.

Full-text searching can take much longer than a typical title, subject, or abstract search. It can also result in documents with very little relevance, other than a brief mention of the topic.  For this reason, you may need to put more thought into your choice of search terms, and other aspects of your search strategy.

If your search is not resulting in as many hits as you would like, try using synonyms or making use of the database search engine stem searching or truncation capabilities.  

You might also try searching a different database.  Arthur Lakes Library licenses several hundred different databases.

If your search is resulting in too many hits, try limiting your search by date of publication or publication type (if available).  

You can also try limiting your search to title words only -- title words are what authors use to describe the primary intent of their publications.  Most full-text databases will allow you to give a command specifying a word or phrase appear in the title.

Some databases are a combination of full-text and citation documents.  Many of these will allow you to specify that only full-text documents are returned.

Proximity searching, if available, specifies how close together in the document you wish your search terms to be.  Typical full-text database searching will find the specified words anywhere in the document, no matter how distant from each other.

Finally, some databases will allow you to do frequency searching, which lets you specify that a word or phrase appears a certain number of times in the record.