How can I filter the RECAP Archive to only show results that have PDFs?

Because of the high cost of PACER content, the RECAP Archive is largely a crowdsourced system. That means that it doesn't have all of the content from PACER, but it does have a lot of it.

When searching RECAP, you do a full text search of docket entries, their associated documents, and case metadata. The results are grouped by case and then show docket entries below the case name.

We have considerably more docket entries than documents, so many queries will return a lot of docket entries that lack associated PDFs in our system.

As a researcher, this presents a few options:

1. If the entry is of interest you may purchase it from PACER. If you have the RECAP Extension installed, the document will be automatically added to our system.

2. If you only want to get results that already have PDFs, you can do so by adding is_available:true to any query.

   For example, this query returns all documents mentioning "Free Law Project".

   This and other fielded search tools are described on the Advanced Search Techniques page.

3. If you cannot remember the search syntax, there is a link in the sidebar to "Only show results with PDFs":

   

   Check that box to filter your results to only PDFs we currently have.

Read the Advanced Search Documentation