Research Tips
These general tips can be useful for researching any person-focused topic, including Black and African Americans in physics. One of the challenges of researching Black and African Americans in physics can sometimes be the relative dearth of easily findable resources due to systemic racism, and researchers often have to get a bit creative, which is why we are including these research tips with this guide.
Libraries and Archives
- It's always worth it to search in a library catalog. You will get different, more curated results than a Google search.
- Look for papers in archives associated with your research subject. Oftentimes, for individuals, papers are deposited at the archive of their place of work. Sometimes you can only view papers by visiting the institution, but it never hurts to ask if they are digitized and can be sent to you.
- Finding aids include more specificity than catalog records for archival collections and are a good place to search; browse or search many history of science finding aids at the Physics History Finding Aids Website.
- Don’t be afraid to reach out to the library/archives staff! They know their collections well and may be able to help you find additional resources.
On the Internet
- Search for your subject’s name on Google news
- Search for their name on Google books
- Search their affiliated university or college news sources: alumni magazines, college newspapers, etc.
- Search for their personal or professional website or homepage
- If you encounter a lot of people with similarly spelled names while you search, try putting quotations around your name or other search terms to narrow down your results.
- Example: Instead of searching for: Warren E. Henry
- Try searching for: “Warren E. Henry”
- If your individual has a common first or last name, you can also try adding additional search terms to narrow down your results.
- Try searching for: Warren Henry physics
- Or search for: Warren Henry Howard University physics
- If the physicist has a Wikipedia page, take a look at the sources it includes.
- Wikipedia is built upon citations to secondary sources. You can trace backwards from a Wikipedia article to find what sources they used by checking the References at the end of articles. Some articles will also have helpful additional information that can be useful at the end of the article, such as tags and external links.
