fulltexts

Fulltexts, occasionally written as full texts or fulltexts, refer to the complete, unabridged contents of written works as published, or digitized from paper, in contrast to extracts, abstracts, or metadata-only records. In digital libraries and scholarly databases, a work is described as available in full text when the entire document can be read, downloaded, or processed by software. Fulltexts may be delivered in various formats, including PDF, HTML, plain text, or ePub, and may be born-digital or produced by optical character recognition from scanned archives. Indexing and search systems often target fulltexts to support precise retrieval, text mining, and data analysis, complementing metadata search.

Access to fulltexts is governed by copyright and licensing. Public domain works and many open-access publications are freely available, while others are available through institutional subscriptions, licensing agreements, or paywalls. Rights management and licensing terms influence what users may copy, reuse, or redistribute the text.

Common uses of fulltexts include scholarly research, literary analysis, and computational linguistics, where researchers apply full-text search, concordancing, or natural language processing to the entire document rather than only summaries. Challenges include OCR errors in scanned materials, variations in formatting, and legal restrictions that limit reuse. Efficient handling of fulltexts also requires robust metadata, standardized representations, and accessibility considerations to support diverse users.