Help Page See also the General FAQ, and the specific EconLog FAQ (blog), and EconTalk FAQ (podcast).

Using the Table of Contents The Slide-Out Table of Contents for the books on this website can be used for rapid navigation through the chapters when the book is viewed in a frame. It is available while you read a book in the frame to the right in your browser. (If not, go to the Books page and select the book you want from there.) To view it, slide it open as follows: Look carefully at the righthand edge in your browser window. Between the scrollbar and the edge of the window you will see an extra narrow vertical bar called the Resizing Bar. Position your cursor over the Resizing Bar. In most browsers, your cursor will change to look like a left/right arrow (or a left/right arrow surrounding two vertical bars). Drag the Resizing Bar to the left. The Table of Contents will appear between the Resizing Bar and the right-hand edge of the browser window. You can customize the Table of Contents to be any width you like. You can leave it showing or hide it by dragging the resizing bar back to the right at any time. The browser will remember your choices as you move from chapter to chapter. (If you resize your browser window, however, you might need to re-slide the table of contents frame; this is a property of browsers.) If you prefer to see the Table of Contents without frames: If your goal is to remove frames altogether, see the FAQ section on removing frames quickly. The following Netscape trick will open the Table of Contents in a new side-window, but links from it will still load the chapters in your original window. You can reduce the size of and relocate the Table of Contents window to your preferred size and location. In Netscape, while viewing the book in Frames: right-click in the Table of Contents frame. Select Open Frame in New Window. If the Resizing Bar does not appear in your browser: You might have loaded the document without frames. Go to the top of the file and select the "Contents (frames)" button, or go to the Books page and reselect the document you want directly from there. You might have accessed the document without frames via an outside search engine such as AltaVista or Google; or perhaps through the Search Tool on this site. Using the Notepad You can open Notepad from this page, from the Books page, or from the Table of Contents of any book. The notepad requires Javascript and cookies to be turned on. These features are turned on by default in all modern browsers. If the notepad does not appear, your browser may not be capable of performing Javascript commands. Please consider updating your browser. All recent versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer are Javascript-enabled. To check that Javascript is turned on, look in your browser's Options or Preferences. Your notes are private! They are kept on your own machine in a browser file called the "cookie file." If you have turned off cookies in your browser, you will not be able to save your notes. Depending on your setting choice, you may get no warning that your notes were not saved. (Just reset your cookie file to accept cookies to resolve this. See your browser's options/preference settings.) If you have no idea what settings you have, then type and save a trial note in the Notepad, close the Notepad window with the "x" box, and then reopen the Notepad. If your note appears, your notes are being saved. If you save your notes, they will reappear any time you reopen the Notepad for 90 days from your last save. Don't forget to save your notes before you close the Notepad window! The Notepad window will remain open and usable until you close it, even if you leave this website or close your browser's other windows. You can copy and paste items from your Notepad to other software any time it is open. You can also delete items from the Notepad any time it is open. Remember to save the Notepad after you delete, or the items will continue to reappear next time you open the Notepad. You can easily cut and paste short quotations of text from the main document into the Notepad! Formatting (e.g., italics), however, will not be retained. Hint: To copy a paragraph number along with an entire paragraph, include the line space that follows the paragraph. If you accidentally delete or type over a note you meant to retain, you can probably Undo it with your keyboard's Undo sequence (try Control+z for PCs and Apple+z on Macs) if you catch it right away. For most browsers, there is a space limit of 4K (approximately 6-8 full notepad-screens' worth of text) for a set of saved notes. If your notes do not reappear when you return to the Notepad: You might have forgotten to save your notes. You might have disabled your cookie file in your browser. You might have switched computers. You can retrieve notes stored on a different computer by copying or directly reading the cookie file, which is a text file. You might have switched browsers. Notes are browser-specific. Using the Search Tools There are three interrelated ways to search for keywords on this website, with quick access from the Search Overview page. In general, the Site Search is a broad search engine that checks every page on the website for simple terms or groups of terms. Full-text searches of all Econlib books, articles, and all other website pages are included. The Card Catalog Search restricts the broad search to Econlib books and classic reprinted essays only, offering in exchange the increased ability to sort the results and specific publication information for each item. The Book Search focuses narrowly on a particular book or classic reprinted essay (or a small subset of these items), and in turn lets you get into the details, culling for you all relevant paragraphs in the book you are searching. Site Search. You can search the whole website for pages (displaying the URLs) with your search terms, called a Site Search. All pages on the website, including the home page, columnists' articles, EconLog articles, this help page, and the full text of all book pages are searched by the Site Search. You may also choose to restrict the search to Articles and EconLog Only (topical articles written expressly for Econlib), as well as other several options. Results can be sorted in various ways, and links for Book Searches or updates for EconLog Searches are offered. See also EconLog FAQ: Search EconLog. Card Catalog Search. You can search all on-site books and reprinted essays for authors, titles, dates, publishers, keywords in the text, etc. and display a table with the publication information, called a Card Catalog Search. The information can be sorted in various ways. From the Card Catalog, you can proceed to the book itself, see the book's Table of Contents, or choose to do a Book Search for any listed item (or groups of up to 30 items). Keyword searches are full-text searches of all books and classic reprinted essays. All items listed in the Books Pages are included. [Thus, the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (CEE) is searched in all Card Catalog Searches. However, articles written expressly for Econlib are not included in a Card Catalog Search.] Book Search. You can display all paragraphs with your search terms, called a Book Search. Only pages from the work(s) you specify are searched by the Book Search—other website pages, such as the columnists' essays, are not searched. All the paragraphs that match your search terms are displayed with your search terms highlighted. To search a specific book, first locate it in the Card Catalog. You'll automatically be offered the option for a Book Search. If you elect to "Search All Books" or "Search a book not in list," you will automatically be shifted to the Card Catalog with instructions on how to proceed. For our most popular books and authors, you can leap directly to the Book Search page, which contains a Drop-Down list of our most popular selections. There you'll also find options to "Search All Books" and "Search a Book Not On the List". If you select either of those options, you'll be taken to the Card Catalog Search. Find your book there and then click the Search Book button for that book or group of books. Which one should I use? For most simple keywords or phrases, we recommend you start with a Site Search. You'll locate all related resources on Econlib, including those in our many articles written expressly for Econlib, such as our Annotated Bibliographies, Teacher's Corners, and our many well-selected Links to other sites. You will also automatically be offered the option of searching specific books (a Book Search) if any particular books contain your keywords! Just click the icon to search the book that is suggested; that whole book will be searched, and any appropriate paragraphs displayed for your examination. If you know you are searching for a book or classic reprinted essay, we recommend the Card Catalog Search. The Card Catalog Search will reduce the number of extraneous hits you get, and organize the results for you in sortable tabular format. You will automatically be offered the option of searching specific books or a group of up to 30 books (a Book Search). The Card Catalog is designed to be visually compact, easier to sort by different categories, and in most cases, faster than a Site Search. You may sometimes want to see all the individual page URLs that contain your search terms. If so, we recommend the Site Search. It is possible for a Site Search or Card Catalog Search to result in a "hit" but for a subsequent Book Search to result in no hits. The most common case when this happens is if you search for multiple keywords which turn out to appear far apart on a page. The Site/Card Catalog Search tools will report a hit for that page; but the Book Search tool will then report no occurrences because the words are not in the same paragraph. For example, if you search for comparative advantage the Site/Card Catalog Search tools will find all pages where the two words "comparative" and "advantage" appear, even if they appear many paragraphs apart. However, the Book Search tool only reports pages with paragraphs containing both words. Try enclosing your search terms in quotation marks to indicate that they are exact phrases. Other reasons that one kind of search may very occasionally pick up occurrences of terms not found in another kind of search are that 1. Book Searches examine the underlying HTML codes and tags but the Site and Card Catalog Searches do not; 2. punctuation and word endings are handled differently by the different search engines; and 3. the syntaxes and options such as case-sensitivity of the different searches differ slightly. For more information see the discussion of syntax. The arrow symbol appearing throughout the articles and Index in the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics is a quick link to the Book Search tool for the keywords suggested alongside. You can modify or change the keywords in the usual manner after clicking the arrow. All search tools use the default syntax of finding material that matches with all your keywords (that is, a Boolean and). In all search tools, you can use quotation marks to surround your term if it is a complete (exact) phrase. The three search tools use slightly different syntaxes for details like wildcards, Boolean or, etc. For example, the Site/Card Catalog Search tools use the familiar syntax of an asterisk (*) as a wildcard (though at the ends of words only). But if you are searching a particular book, you might occasionally want to search for literal asterisks, which usually indicate footnotes in the text. Thus, in the Book Search, a pound sign (#) serves as the wildcard. Similarly, the Book Search tool lets you search for some exact punctuation, such as question marks and periods, which will not function properly in the Site Search tool. You can do most of your searches without worrying about the minor syntax differences! If you are looking for something complex, we suggest you examine the syntax details for ideas and for the greatest likelihood of finding what you are looking for. Although different syntaxes might seem inelegant at first, it makes sense to allow each search tool to use the maximum power of the underlying programming languages because the goals of the searches are usually different. Syntax for Site Search. Syntax for Card Catalog Search. Syntax for Book Search. Using the Citation Generator You can generate the complete MLA, APA, or Turabian citation style for the url for each of the books on this website by clicking the link marked "Cite this Page" in the colored navigation bar at the top or left-hand side of a book page, or the link to the Citation Generator at the bottom of each book page. The material in the citation gives the properly formatted printed book title, author, publisher, and publication date to which the website edition was proofread. It also generates the current date and the exact url of the page (which may not be evident if you are viewing the page in a frame), according to the standards and styles suggested by the MLA, APA, and the 6th edition of A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, by Kate Turabian, for citing material from the web. The citation/reference style will pop up in a new window. Just copy and paste the appropriate style to your own word processor. For most modern hardware and software, even formatting details will copy and paste intact. Depending on your browser, word processor, and platform (IBM or MacIntosh, etc.), you may have to reformat the material slightly. (For example, sometimes underlining or indentation do not transfer between the browser and word processor.) Instructions, alerts, and suggestions appear on the pop-up page. Please consult your publisher or teacher for required details about order, punctuation, indention, etc. The pop-up page also gives links to the official MLA and APA websites, and several links for Turabian style examples, plus links to other fine sources for citing web pages. Toward the bottom of the pop-up page you will also find the exact HTML code necessary to link to that page or the book's main page. If you are creating a link to the page, you can copy that material into your HTML code to link to the book page in question. Footnote pages have a Citation Generator link at the bottom of the page. See also the FAQ material on public domain and copyright information.