List of Research Resources
Research resources are usually thought of as primary sources and secondary sources.
Primary sources are firsthand accounts of actual events written by an eyewitness, either at the time it occurred or even well after, as in memoirs and oral histories. They may also be letters, official records, interviews, photographs, video, survey results, or unanalyzed statistical data. These sources contain raw data and information, such as the original work of art, fiction or music; or immediate impressions.
Secondary sources, on the other hand, are works that analyze, assess or interpret an historical event, era, or phenomenon, generally utilizing primary sources to do so. They often offer a review or a critique. Secondary sources can include books, journal articles, speeches, reviews, research reports, magazines, newspapers, and more.
Down below is a list of research resources for not only academics, but writers too. There’s so many out there that I know I won’t be able to list them all, but I do hope that what’s already on here can help you in some way.
Google -- can be a good resource for research, if it is used effectively.
There are specific techniques that you can use such as the quotation marks to help you narrow the focus of a search. For example, if you use chocolate pudding as your keywords Google shows you over 334 million results. If you enter "chocolate pudding" using quotation marks you will get about 5 million results.
If you add a minus sign, which is this - in front of the word (or words) you don't want your search results to include, Google will not include any content that matches this word in its results. Let's say you want results for "Michelle Williams" but you don't want results for the actress.
Because there are two famous Michelle Williams, one is an actress who played Jen Lindley on Dawson's Creek and the other is the former Destiny's Child singer. So if you use the - minus sign it will help you narrow and refined your search such as "Michelle Williams” -actress -actor OR you can do “Michelle Williams” -actress -actor +singer to be more specific.
The asterisk, which is this * acts like a wildcard in a search. This is useful if do not know part of a phrase. For example: * ate the canary OR shadow and * by * for when you don’t know the title of a book and/or the author. Google will fill in the blanks and match it with any phrase or word that’s relevant.
By using “site:” (without the quotations marks) then typing a website’s address, you can limit your search to results from only that website or source. This tip is especially helpful when you're looking for a page on a website that doesn't have its own search function. For example: You want to see whether a specific source, like the Time Out magazine, has covered a particular topic, like cat cafes. In this case, you'd type something like this → site:www.timeout.com cat cafe into Google and you’ll get results of any articles that mention “cat cafe”.
Another way to use this trick, but for broader results, is to restrict your search to a type of source, like academic institutions "edu" or nonprofit organizations "org". Simply follow the "site:" (without the quotations marks) with "org" or "edu," then your search terms. This is especially helpful when looking for more credible or research-backed information. Lets say you only want research and articles on Victorian medicine then your Google search should be something like → site:edu “Victorian” medicine
RefSeek -- is a web search engine for students and researchers that aims to make academic information easily accessible to everyone. It searches more than five billion documents, including web pages, books, encyclopedias, journals, and newspapers.
Infoplease -- is a free, authoritative, and respected reference for Internet users that provides a comprehensive encyclopedia, atlas, dictionary, and several almanacs loaded with statistics, facts, and historical records.
FindArticles -- is a CBS Interactive portal that lets you find articles about any topic, by searching in their network of news and technology sites.
Wolfram|Alpha: Computational Intelligence -- is a computational knowledge engine and answer engine developed by Wolfram Research. It answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from externally sourced data.
Encyclopedia Britannica | Britannica -- is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia which is now published exclusively as an online encyclopaedia. It is a fully searchable and browsable collection of articles, biographies, videos and so on. It is best suited to provide background information rather than in-depth analysis.
Encyclopedia Mythica -- is a online encyclopedia containing information on mythology, folklore, legends, and more. Contains thousands of articles about deities and beings from all corners of the world, and new articles are added frequently. The information in the encyclopedia has been compiled from a great number of different and unique sources (books, journals and publications, oral traditions, etc.) into one, easily accessible website.
Mythopedia -- is made up of experts, scholars and researchers with backgrounds in ancient history, comparative mythology, religious studies, and related disciplines, united by a penchant for mythology, research and superlative writing. It’s a resource that allows you to explore mythology from all over the world. Included are Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Chinese, Norse, Japanese, Celtic and Aztec.
Oxford Research Encyclopedias -- is a digital encyclopedia, containing peer-reviewed trustworthy research that’s continuously updated by the world's leading scholars and researchers.
Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) -- is an international effort, led by the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, to raise awareness and understanding of living nature by providing free, open, multilingual, digital access to trusted information on all known species.
DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals -- is a website that hosts a community-curated list that indexes and provides open access of high quality, peer-reviewed journals covering all scientific and scholarly subjects. It’s maintained by Infrastructure Services for Open Access.
Trove -- is an Australian online library database aggregator and service which includes full text documents, digital images, bibliographic and holdings data of items which are not available digitally, and a free faceted-search engine as a discovery tool.
Internet Archive -- is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications, games, music, movies, videos, moving images, and millions of books.
They also have the Wayback Machine, which lets you see webpages as they looked at a particular time. Such as when you want to view a unedited, old or deleted articles, blog posts, fanfiction, etc.
Google Scholar -- is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats, disciplines and resources. If the paper you want is behind a paywall, then definitely go check on Sci-Hub for it.
Sci-Hub -- is a shadow library website that provides free access to millions of research papers and books, without regard to copyright, by bypassing publishers' paywalls in various ways.
PLOS -- is a nonprofit open-access science, technology, and medicine publisher with a library of open-access journals and other scientific literature under an open-content license.
Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) -- is one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources. BASE provides more than 240 million documents from more than 8,000 content providers. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed documents for free. BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.
WorldCat.org: The World's Largest Library Catalog -- is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of 15,637 libraries in 107 countries that participate in the OCLC global cooperative. It includes books, periodicals, archives and manuscripts, maps, films, online resources, and other materials.
HathiTrust -- is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving 17+ million digitized items. HathiTrust offers reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. copyright law, computational access to the entire corpus for scholarly research, and other emerging services based on the combined collection.
ArchiveGrid -- is a collection of over five million archival material descriptions, including MARC records from WorldCat and finding aids harvested from the web. It contains archival collections held by thousands of libraries, museums, historical societies, and archives.
Oregon Historical Society Digital Collections -- is a non-profit organization that provides online public access to a rich variety of materials from the OHS Research Library collections, including items from their manuscript, photograph, film, and oral history collections.
NCBI (The National Center for Biotechnology Information) -- is part of the United States National Library of Medicine, a branch of the National Institutes of Health. It is a leading source for public biomedical databases, software tools for analyzing molecular and genomic data, and research in computational biology. NCBI creates and maintains over 40 integrated databases for the medical and scientific communities as well as the general public.
PubMed -- is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health maintain the database as part of the Entrez system of information retrieval.
MedlinePlus -- is an online information service produced by the United States National Library of Medicine. The service provides curated consumer health information in English and Spanish with select content in additional languages.
AllPsych -- is one stop psychology website with hundreds of articles, free online texts, APA Approved CEs, Positive Psychology & CBT Self-Help, and more.
APADictionary of Psychology -- is an online psychology dictionary from the American Psychological Association (APA). It contains over 25,000 entries from 90 subfields of psychology.
Psychology Today -- is a mental health magazine with a focus on psychology and human behavior. It includes free access to content written by clinicians, experts and researchers from across the fields of behavior and psychology. The site includes a Diagnosis Dictionary, which is a comprehensive guide to diagnosable conditions; hundreds of commonly used and need-to-know psychology Basics, a full overview of Therapy Types, and comprehensive content Centers dedicated to subjects from ADHD to Parenting.
Simply Psychology -- is a collection of freely accessible psychology articles, videos, and demonstrations geared toward helping undergraduate psychology students gain a basic understanding of the field. Each topic article also provides links to relevant journals and academic studies, related research and topics, to provide a wealth of additional information to aid learning.
Medical Heritage Library -- is a collaborative digitization and discovery organization committed to providing open access resources in the history of healthcare and the health sciences. They have a collection of digitized medical rare books, pamphlets, journals, and films number in the tens of thousands, with representative works from each of the past six centuries.
National Library of Medicine (NLM): Digital Collections -- all of the content in this collection is freely available worldwide and, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. It covers the areas of biomedicine, health care and the history of medicine.
Pew Research Center -- is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research.
Surveys of Consumers -- it requires registration, but the Surveys of Consumers is conducted by the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan. The purpose of these surveys is to measure changes in consumer attitudes and expectations, to understand why these changes occur, to evaluate how they relate to consumer decisions to save, borrow, or make discretionary purchases, and to forecast changes in aggregate consumer behavior.
The National Academies Press (NAP) -- was created to publish the reports issued by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and the National Research Council. They provide authoritative, independently-researched information in all areas and they offer more than 8,500 titles in PDF format. Almost all of these PDFs can be downloaded for free by the chapter or the entire book.
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) -- is a US project aimed at providing public access to digital holdings in order to create a large-scale public digital library. It contains millions of photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States.
Digital Collections -- is the University of Southern Mississippi Libraries’ containing quality digital collections of texts, images, and audio materials.
Library of Congress -- is the research library with millions of books, recordings, photographs, newspapers, maps and manuscripts in its collections. The Library is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country.
United States Census Bureau -- is the main source of data about the nation’s people and economy. Every 10 years, it conducts the Population and Housing Census, in which every resident in the United States is counted. The agency also gathers data through more than 100 other surveys of households and businesses every one to five years. You can explore the results of the surveys or find popular quick facts. Besides using census data for the benefit of public services, you can also use it for genealogical research.
U.S. Data and Statistics -- is an interagency product administered by USAGov (formerly the Federal Citizen Information Center), a division of the U.S. General Services Administration's Technology Transformation Service. You can find data about the U.S., such as demographic and economic data, population, and maps.
The World Factbook -- is also known as the CIA World Factbook, is a reference resource produced by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with almanac-style information about the countries of the world. It provides a two- to three-page summary of the demographics, geography, communications, government, economy, and military of each of 267 international entities including U.S.-recognized countries, dependencies, and other areas in the world.
Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) -- is an internet-based digital library of education research and information sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education. ERIC provides access to bibliographic records of journal and non-journal literature from 1966 to the present.
Database of International Business Statistics (DIBS) -- is created by the International Business Center and the Eli Broad College of Business at Michigan State University (IBC), globalEDGE. It is a knowledge web-portal that connects international business professionals worldwide to a wealth of information, insights, and learning resources on global business activities.
It contains over 5,000 variables from over 200 countries to aid in international business research. Access to the data requires free registration and is intended only for academic use by students, faculty, and researchers of educational or government institutions.
World Bank Open Data -- is an international financial institution that provides loans and grants to the governments of low- and middle-income countries for the purpose of pursuing capital projects. It provides a listing of free and open access to World Bank datasets, including databases, pre-formatted tables, reports, and other resources.
Data & Statistics -- contains data and statistics topics, tools, and related organizations at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
General Social Survey (GSS) -- is a nationally representative survey of adults in the United States conducted since 1972. The GSS collects data on contemporary American society in order to monitor and explain trends in opinions, attitudes and behaviors. The GSS aims to make high-quality data easily accessible to scholars, students, policy-makers, and others, with minimal cost and waiting.
National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) -- is a source of authoritative data on alcohol epidemiology for researchers and the general public.
National Center for Statistics and Analysis (NCSA) -- is an office of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), and is responsible for providing a wide range of analytical and statistical support to NHTSA and the highway safety community at large. In addition to its own data input sources NCSA uses data from other governmental agencies, as well as crash files from a number of states, to support analytical activities.
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) -- is the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education in the U.S. and other nations. NCES is located within the U.S. Department of Education and the Institute of Education Sciences.
Digital History -- is a site designed and developed to support the teaching of American History in K-12 schools and colleges and is supported by the College of Education at the University of Houston.
The site also contains resource guides for historical eras and topics. Each includes a historical overview, links to the relevant Digital History textbook chapters, bibliographies, classroom handouts, charts, chronologies, film guides, historic newspaper articles, primary source documents, lesson plans, historic maps, music, cartoons, quizzes, and images.
New York Public Library Picture Collection Online -- contains 30,000 images of New York City, costume, design, U.S. history, etc. from books, magazines and newspapers, as well as original photographs, prints and postcards, mostly created before 1923.
Europeana -- is a web portal created by the European Union containing digitized cultural heritage collections of more than 3,000 institutions across Europe.
Digita Vaticana -- is a non-profit organization established to raise funds to support the digitization project of more than 80,000 manuscripts of the Vatican Apostolic Library. They’re all available to view free of charge.
Internet Sacred Text Archive (ISTA) -- is a freely available archive of electronic texts about religion, mythology, legends and folklore, and occult and esoteric topics. Texts are presented in English translation and, where possible, in the original language.
Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) -- provides free access to the most authoritative religion statistics, data and church membership reports from around the world, including Christian statistics and adherents data.
Religious Institute -- is a multi-faith organization dedicated to advocating for sexual health, education, and justice in faith communities and society. More than 6,400 clergy, seminary presidents and deans, religious scholars and other religious leaders representing more than 70 faith traditions are part of the Religious Institute’s national network.
American Academy of Religion (AAR) -- is a professional association of teachers and research scholars, dedicated to furthering knowledge of religion and religious institutions in all their forms and manifestations. Includes useful tools such as course syllabi, online articles, and various teaching resources.
Digital Occult Library -- is hosted by the City University of New York (CUNY) Commons. It is an online, academic social network for everyone, not just those registered on the Commons. It features (in this iteration) twenty-five unique pages with information on and discussion of occult and esoteric topics.
The purpose of the site is to inform three types of interested parties on the highlighted topics: a general audience with no current knowledge of the occult, practitioners of esoteric traditions, and academics. Not only is the site meant to inform, it is a means by which the three groups may interact and discuss the topic to everyone's mutual benefit.
Special Collections & University Archives (SCUA) -- at San Diego State University, their Special Collections & University Archives houses rare, fine, unique, and valuable books, periodicals, manuscripts, and documents. They also have other valuable historical items such as photographs, prints, postcards, memorabilia, scrapbooks, and oral histories. Even sources documenting the history of San Diego State since its founding as a Normal School in 1897.
But its strength is in the occult, magic, and witchcraft-related materials. They have a solid collection of herbals or materia medica as well as witch hunting treatises. They also have numerous materials from the Occult Revival, including spellbooks, as well as tons of pop culture in which the occult is prominently featured.
Cornell University Witchcraft Collection -- is a part of Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell’s Witchcraft Collection contains over 3,000 titles documenting the history of the Inquisition and the persecution of witchcraft, primarily in Europe.
The majority of the Witchcraft Collection was acquired in the 1880s through the collaborative efforts of Andrew Dickson White, Cornell’s first President, and his first librarian, George Lincoln Burr. The collection documents the earliest and the latest manifestations of the belief in witchcraft as well as its geographical boundaries, and elaborates this history with works on canon law, the Inquisition, torture, demonology, trial testimony, and narratives. The collection focuses on witchcraft not as folklore or anthropology, but as theology and as religious heresy.
It features many early texts from the period when the theory of the heresy of witchcraft was being formulated, including fourteen Latin editions of the Malleus maleficarum, which codified church dogma on heresy.
Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project -- from the University of Virginia, the material presented in the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive is provided freely for non-commercial educational purposes. All other uses require advance permission from the project originators.
Culinary Institute of America (CIA): Archives and Special Collections -- is housed in the Conrad N. Hilton Library. It collects materials related to culinary and food history to further culinary education and research. They have over 30,000 historical menus, culinary-related rare books, historical recipe pamphlets, and much more.
Open Folklore -- is a partnership of the American Folklore Society and the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries. It is a scholarly communications effort to make a greater number and variety of useful resources available to folklorists. You can search through journals, books, websites and gray literature on folklore.
Theoi Project: Guide to Greek Mythology -- it was created by Aaron J. Atsma from Aukland, New Zealond, with help from the libraries of the University of Aukland and Leiden University in the Netherlands.
It is a comprehensive site exploring Greek mythology and the gods in classical literature and art. The aim of the project is to provide a free reference guide to the gods (theoi), spirits (daimones), fabulous creatures (theres) and heroes of ancient Greek mythology and religion.
The Perseus Digital Library -- is a digital library project of Tufts University, which assembles digital collections of humanities resources. It covers the history, literature and culture of the Greco-Roman world.
Papyri.info -- is produced by the Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing & the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World and has two primary components.
The Papyrological Navigator (PN) supports searching, browsing, and aggregation of ancient papyrological documents and related materials; the Papyrological Editor (PE) enables multi-author, version controlled, peer reviewed scholarly curation of papyrological texts, translations, commentary, scholarly metadata, institutional catalog records, bibliography, and images.
Osirisnet -- is a great source for richly illustrated images and information on tombs throughout Egypt. It is constantly updated and “one of the websites "recommended for Egyptology research" by Professor Khaled el-Enany, former Director of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Minister of Antiquities of Egypt.
Research Animal Resources (RAR) -- provides the University of Minnesota research community with animal care, procurement services, veterinary knowledge, and maintenance of housing facilities for animal-related research activities.
FamilySearch -- is a non-profit organization and website offering genealogical records, education, and software. It is operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and is closely connected with the church's Family History Department. It is free of charge to everyone, regardless of tradition, culture, or religious affiliation.
MyHeritage -- is an online genealogy platform with web, mobile, and software products and services, introduced by the Israeli company MyHeritage. Users of the platform can obtain their family trees, upload and browse through photos, and search through over 14 billion historical records; birth, marriage and death records. This is all available with the 14-day free trial. Use it free for two weeks and cancel if it’s not for you.
Allen County Public Library -- is a public library system located in Fort Wayne, Allen County, Indiana, United States. Its Genealogy Center is a unique and valuable resource for the Northeastern Indiana community and the entire genealogical community at large. They have one of the largest research collections available, incorporating records from around the world.
Ancestry Free Indexes -- is an American genealogy company based in Lehi, Utah. It’s the largest for-profit genealogy company in the world, containing a network of genealogical, historical records, and related genetic genealogy websites.
The problem is that many of these genealogy sites required a subscription if you want to do a search. But not everything on Ancestry.com is behind a paywall. It does has a number of free collections which include census records, immigration records, military records, prison records, wills, biographies, and a large number of Jewish records from eastern Europe. There’s a good representation of international records, as well as those from the United States.
Ellis Island -- the passenger lists can be a great resource for your research and through this website, you can explore the history of Ellis Island. You’ll also get tips on genealogy research, and be able to search the 65 million Ellis Island database entries for your immigrant ancestors.
Castle Garden -- before Ellis Island, Castle Garden was the main immigration processing center in New York. This is a free database developed and funded by The Battery Conservancy. It contains and makes available eleven million records of immigrants who arrived at the Port of New York from 1820 - 1892.
The results may include information such as the ship they arrived on, the person’s age, birthplace, origin, destination, and who paid for their passage.
Fulton History -- is a historic newspaper website that contains archives of over 1,000 New York newspapers, along with collections from other states and Canada. You can browse the folders of digitized documents or search for specific words and phrases on the search page. As of February 2018, the site had almost 50 million scanned newspaper pages.
Reclaim the Records -- is a not-for-profit activist group of genealogists, historians, researchers, and open government advocates. They identifies information that should be in the public domain but has been wrongly restricted by government archives, libraries, and agencies that holds it.
They file Freedom of Information and Open Data requests to get that public data released back to the public. And if the government doesn’t comply, they take them to court. Then they digitize everything they win and put it all online for free, without any paywalls or usage restrictions, so that it can never be locked up again.
Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection -- is an extensive map collection owned by the Perry–Castañeda Library at The University of Texas at Austin. There’s more than 250,000 maps in the collection and most of these maps are public domain. The website is archived as of 2021 and no longer being updated, but is still available online for everyone to access.
David Rumsey Historical Map Collection -- David Rumsey is an American map collector and the founder of the collection which can be found at Stanford University. It contains more than 150,000 maps. The collection focuses on rare 16th through 21st century maps of North and South America, as well as maps of the World, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania.
The collection includes atlases, globes, wall maps, school geographies, pocket maps, books of exploration, maritime charts, and a variety of cartographic materials including pocket, wall, children's, and manuscript maps. Items range in date from around 1550 to the present.
Duke University Libraries Digital Collections -- has a Digital Repository which has a collection of about 600 advertising items and publications dating from 1850 to 1920, illustrating the rise of consumer culture and the birth of a professionalized advertising industry in the United States.
Vintage Ad Browser -- is a site that aims to collect vintage ads from a variety of sources, from the late 19th century to the present: browse through categories from alcohol, guns and tobacco to computers, perfume and propaganda.
Project Gutenberg -- is a non-profit organization that maintains an electronic library of public domain works that have been digitized, or converted into e-books, by volunteers and archived for free download from the organization’s website.
Documenting the American South (DocSouth) -- is a digital publishing initiative sponsored by the University Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, provides access to digitized primary materials such as texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.
Vietnam Center & Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive (VNCA) -- is a part of Texas Tech University, and is the nation's largest and most comprehensive collection of information on the Vietnam War. The site has over 2.7 million pages of scanned materials including documents, photographs, slides, negatives, oral histories, artifacts, moving images, sound recordings, maps, and collection finding aids.
Studies in Scarlet: Marriage and Sexuality in the U.S. & U.K., 1815-1914 -- is drawn from the Harvard Law School Library’s extensive trial collections, Studies in Scarlet features over 420 trial narratives involving the crimes and passions of both renowned and ordinary people. It includes American, British, and Irish cases from 1815 to 1914 involving domestic violence, bigamy, seduction, breach of promise to marry, child custody, rape, and murder.
British Pathé -- is the world's leading multimedia resource with a history stretching back over a century. The entire archive, which is a treasure trove of 85,000 films (and spanning the years from 1896 to 1978) is available to view online for free on their website and YouTube.
Victoriana Magazine -- is a magazine for Victorian and 19th century style living. It’s a greatly illustrated web site featuring an extensive collection of articles and period resources for the Victorian enthusiast covering a wide range of topics from a British Queen’s wardrobe to Victorian corsets, from funeral customs to Victorian calling-card etiquette, from historical architecture to Victorian gardens.
VictorianVoices -- is the web's largest topical archive of articles from Victorian periodicals - a veritable online encyclopedia of Victorian life, featuring over 12,000 articles from hundreds of Victorian-era magazines from Britain and America.
Colonial America -- is a digitized collection of all 1,450 volumes of the CO 5 series of Colonial Office files held at The National Archives of the United Kingdom in London, plus all extracted documents associated with them. It covers the period 1606 to 1822. It also consists of the original correspondence between the British government and the governments of the American colonies.
Frontier Life: Borderlands, Settlement & Colonial Encounters -- is a collection of digitized primary sources documenting the various frontiers that arose from the movements of Europeans to Africa, Australasia and North America. Document types include correspondence, diaries, government papers, business records, land transactions, legal documents, speeches, books and pamphlets. The earliest documents are from the seventeenth century and the latest the mid-point of the twentieth century.
Snopes -- is formerly known as the Urban Legends Reference Pages, is a fact-checking website. It has been described as a "well-regarded reference for sorting out myths and rumors" on the Internet. They always link to and document their sources so readers are empowered to do independent research and make up their own minds.
ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World -- is the first interactive geospatial network model of the ancient Roman world. It simulates the time and financial expense associated with a wide range of different types of travel in antiquity. The model is based on a simplified version of the giant network of cities, roads, rivers and sea lanes that framed movement across the Roman Empire. It broadly reflects conditions around 200 CE but also covers a few sites and roads created in late antiquity. It’s a unique resource for our understanding of premodern history.
RhymeZone -- is an app and website owned and operated by Datamuse that allows the user to search for rhymes, synonyms and definitions. It’s very useful when it comes to writing poetry, song lyrics, greeting cards, witticisms, etc.
Human Mortality Database (HMD) -- it provides detailed mortality and population data to researchers, students, journalists, policy analysts, and others interested in the history of human longevity.
Biography -- is a free and semi-authoritative source of biographical information, photos and videos on over 25,0000 individuals maintained and distributed by the A&E Television Networks and The Biography Channel. Contains biographical information on over 25,000 individuals from the past and present.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) -- is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and space research.
Ask A Biologist -- is a pre-kindergarten through high school program dedicated to answering questions from students, their teachers, and parents. The primary focus of the program is to connect students and teachers with working scientists through a question and answer Web e-mail form. It is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and National Science Digital Library (NSDL). It is also an academic unit of The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences of the Arizona State University.
Ask An Anthropologist -- is another educational resource for students, teachers, parents, and life-long learners from the Arizona State University. In which you can ask an anthropologist a question and get a answer.
Ask An Astrophysicist -- is a service of the Imagine the Universe! web site from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). They are a small group of volunteers who work on space-based astronomical observations, including cosmic-ray, gamma-ray, and X-ray astrophysics. Their research subjects are often exotic, like black holes, dark matter, and the origin of the universe.
Please consult the archive first to see if your question has already been answered. They attempt to answer as many questions as possible, but they are a small group of volunteers and cannot afford the time to answer all the incoming questions.
Ask A Lunar Scientist -- is a service by The Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute, originally the NASA Lunar Science Institute, to answer questions from the public about lunar science. But first search their database of previous Questions and Answers to see if your question has already been answered.
Ask a Physicist -- is a service of the Heliophysics Science Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). They strive to provide complete, understandable answers to questions about cosmic and heliospheric science and to encourage all to explore the many varied facets of scientific study.
First read through the answers to previous questions before you ask them a question.
Ask Astro -- is a monthly American magazine about astronomy. Targeting amateur astronomers, it contains columns on sky viewing, reader-submitted astrophotographs, and articles on astronomy and astrophysics for general readers. You can search their archive of questions to see if anyone has already asked your question or submit your own question, which they may answer in the next issue of the magazine.
Ask A Marine Biologist -- is the leading magazine for scuba diving enthusiasts, and an official publication of the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI). They have a monthly column where Dr. David Shiffman answers your questions about the underwater world. Topics are chosen from reader-submitted queries as well as data from common internet searches. Check there first to see if your question has already been answered. If not, you can ask and see if it might appear in the next column.
Ask A Doctor -- is the first tech-forward provider of learning assessments and support services for students with learning differences. If you’ve got a question (especially about learning differences, support options, accreditations, or anything else care-related) then you’ll get a response from a actual doctor.
Ask A Firefighter -- St. Tammany Fire District #12 is located in the U.S. state of Louisiana, in the city of Covington. If you have any firefighter questions you can contact them, but first check their FAQ to see if it has already been answered.
Ask A Firefighter -- Adams County Fire Rescue (ACFR) provides fire and emergency services to the communities of Adams County, Colorado in U.S. and is dedicated to providing quality, timely, and professional emergency services to those who live in, work in, and drive through their district. If you’ve a question that only a firefighter can answer, then submit it and a ACFR firefighter will answer it.
Ask a Firefighter or Paramedic -- is the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department (SDFD) which provides fire protection and emergency medical services to the city of San Diego, California, United States. If you have a question for a firefighter or a paramedic they’ll answer it.
Ask a Librarian -- from the Library of Congress has a section where you can ask their librarians and program specialists questions or for their assistance. There’s a ‘ask a general question’ tab or browse their FAQs tab to see if your question has already been answered.
Ask A Law Librarian -- from The Trial Court Law Libraries of Massachusetts in the United States, provide public access to legal information with books, databases and web resources. They know that sometimes you need a little help finding just the right source of information or learning how to use it, so they offer several ways for you to ask a question.
Ask A Librarian -- is from the Indiana State Library. They accept reference and research questions via Ask-a-Librarian, Live Chat, telephone, and mail. Questions may be submitted via Ask-a-Librarian at any time and will be answered within two business days.
Ask A Scientist -- is from the Journal of Emerging Investigators (JEI), which is an open-access journal that publishes original research in the biological and physical sciences that is written by middle and high school students. JEI is also a non-profit organization run and operated by graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and professors across the United States.
Their Ask A Scientist offers an opportunity to correspond with a scientist pen pal to answer all of your questions. Simply fill out the form, and they will match you with a scientist who can help get your experiment off the ground and ready for publication.
Ask A Therapist -- is from IDONTMIND, which is an official program of Mental Health America, the nation's leading community-based non-profit dedicated to promoting the overall mental health of everyone.
Ask A Therapist is an ongoing collection of your mental health questions answered by real therapists. It’s an opportunity to better understand yourself and your mental health in a new way and to get on a path to healing.
Scroll through their questions and answers. If you don’t see what you’re looking for, submit your own question. Remember, this is meant to be a resource and is not a replacement for treatment.
Ask A Nurse -- is a free service offered by the Santa Barbara City College (SBCC) Health Services.
Medical questions are answered by e-mail during normal Health Services operating hours. Answers to questions submitted during the weekend may take up to 72 hours. The Health Services nurse may suggest an alternate source for your answer depending on the nature of the question.
Information you receive in answer to your question is intended solely for general educational purposes and is not intended nor implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice regarding a specific medical condition or question.
Ask a Genealogist -- American Ancestors/New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) is the oldest and largest genealogical society in the United States, founded in 1845. NEHGS provides family history services through its staff, original scholarship, website, educational opportunities, and research center.
You can ask their experts any questions about genealogy and local history. Just make sure to catch them when their service is available, which you can tell when the chat icon pops up in the lower right-hand corner of the page. Enter your question or message in the chat box and one of their genealogists will respond.
Ask A Geologist -- from the Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences at Appalachian State University.
They will answer questions that you might have about the natural environment around you - rocks, minerals, fossils, landslides, earthquakes, water quality, fracking, climate... they have expertise in all fields of earth science.
Ask-a-Geologist is a service they provide to the community free of charge, but please be aware that administering this program is not their department's primary mission.
Ask A Mortician -- is a Youtube video series created and hosted by Caitlin Doughty, a licensed funeral director and eco-friendly mortician in Los Angeles, California. You can check out her videos to see if she has already answered any questions you have about death, dying, decomposition, mourning, funeral customs and so on.
In addition, visit her website The Order of the Good Death, a non-profit death acceptance organization that aims to help people overcome their fear of death. They have a list of resources to guide you through hard subjects like talking about death, planning for your death or the death of a loved one (including your pets), and to help you navigate death legislation (like fetal burial laws).
They even have a archive of articles, which is a magical death library full of subjects you’ve (likely) never even thought of, including practical how-to’s, unknown death history, social justice issues, and much more.
Reddit -- is a network of communities where people can dive into their interests, hobbies and passions. But the main thing is that there’s a subreddit dedicated to practically every topic on the planet. So if you are looking for story-specific research, the best way to get good results is to go to a subreddit that specializes in that subject matter. For example, you want to know what it’s like to live in Alaska’s wilderness you can go to r/alaska and find people who live in or near the wilderness to answer your questions.
You could also conduct interviews with an actual Native American (even from a specific tribe) on a topic you’re researching. For example, the Native American women's experiences in health care. Well, you can go to r/IndianCountry to ask (they even have a research request section).
Likewise, most questions of research can be answered by “ask” subreddits like r/askscience, r/askhistorians, r/askengineers, r/asklinguistics, r/askdocs, etc… which are populated by actual vetted and credentialed scientists, historians and so on and require citations in their answers.
Stack Exchange -- is a network of question-and-answer websites on topics in diverse fields, each site covering a specific topic, where questions, answers, and users are subject to a reputation award process. It’s similar to Reddit where the reputation system allows the sites to be self-moderating.
I prefer Reddit, but Stack Exchange is my second go-to website. For example: If you’ve got a English Language & Usage or Latin Language question then you’ll get answers from linguists, etymologists, and serious English or Latin language enthusiasts.
They’ve also got Mathematics Stack Exchange, Academia Stack Exchange, Writing Stack Exchange, Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, History Stack Exchange, Astronomy Stack Exchange, Biology Stack Exchange, and so on.
Quora -- is an American social question-and-answer website. People could ask anything, and people knowledgeable in that domain could answer them. It’s useful, but keep in mind that you might not always get accurate or quality answers. That’s because there is no fact checking and no credential checking.
Youtube -- is an American online video sharing and social media platform owned by Google.
Just like Wikipedia, which is not a reliable source because it can be edited by anyone at any time and any information it contains at a particular time could be vandalism, a work in progress, or just plain wrong; Youtube itself is not a reliable source either. Anyone on YouTube and other video-sharing sites can create or manipulate a video clip, and upload without editorial oversight, just as with a self-published website.
However, if you are interested in using a YouTube video in your research, look at whether the publisher is a larger organization (such as TED or National Geographic) or a single user that only publishes under a username. While not all large organizations produce unbiased information, more well-known organizations will most likely provide more credible information. Some even include links of their sources in the description box (or within the video itself) that you can use to further your research.
