Pulsar Searches - Tricks of the Trade

The study of pulsars has come a long way since their accidental discovery as ``scruff'' on pen chart recordings of the radio sky at 81 MHz by Jocelyn Bell and Anthony Hewish at Cambridge some thirty years ago. The present sample of almost 800 objects is the result of an immense amount of observing time at the largest radio telescopes around the world. This article highlights the most exciting finds, and summarises the most commonly used, yet relatively simple, techniques which continue to be most efficient at finding weak periodic signals hidden in noisy time series.