How to Find Academic History Information
- 1). Search databases such as EBSCOhost and Academic Search Primer for articles related to your interest. If you don't have access to either of these engines, try Google Scholar. Change the wording to get the widest range of choices. Survey work published recently and several decades ago to see how approaches to academic history have changed.
- 2). Look up your interest in a library's card catalogue. If you've found an author you like on EBSCOhost, try to find longer works by the same historian. Find the section of the Dewey Decimal System where your interest is located and look through this section for other books.
- 3). Figure out the trends in academic history by charting dates and intersections in argument or style. All publishing information is found on the first page of a printed article or in the first few pages of a book. Often, academic historians are responding to another historian or have been trained by another historian in the same field.
- 4). Search the bibliography of the article or the book for more work in the area. Academic works of history almost always have a dense, well-organized bibliography listing all relevant work related to the subject. Sometimes, bibliographies are available online at websites that compile the scholarship on a specific subject.
- 5). Contact the academic historians you have become interested in. Ask questions about their methodology or interests. Their email address and phone number will be listed on the faculty page in their university's History department. If they've changed jobs, a Google search may turn up their new affiliation.
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