Research Guides: *Primary Sources: A Guide: Scientific Works

When Scholarship becomes a Primary Source

When historians want to study the history of education, research, and knowledge itself, they often turn to the publications and notes of researchers and use them as primary sources.

It can seem counterintuitive to use journal articles and textbooks as primary sources--we usually think about these as secondary sources. However, think, for example, about how a history textbook from the 1920s is evidence of professional thinking and teaching during this time period.

When analyzing scholarly works as primary sources, consider the following:

What were the accepted ideas and theories of the time?
How do the text and citations reveal professional relationships?
How was scholarship funded, and by whom?
How were scholarly ideas shared, and who had access to them?

Scientific Manuscripts & Rare Books @ FSU

Scientific Manuscripts & Rare Books @ FSU
The Special Collections at FSU Libraries include wide range of rare and historically significant scientific works. Browse a sampling of these fascinating collections.

Historical Journal Articles & Scientific Books

JSTOR This link opens in a new window
An archive of the back issues of core journals in the humanities, social sciences and sciences.
Tutorials:
JSTOR on YouTube
How to search (04:20)
Primary Source Collection: 19th-Century British Pamphlets (00:51)

Abbreviation: jstor
Vendor: JSTOR
Coverage: 1665–Current
Subjects: Arts Administration, Art History, *General / Multi-Subject
Type: E-Book Collections, E-Journal Collections
HathiTrust This link opens in a new window
HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world. Includes full text access to works published before 1923, and is thus a great resource for historical works of scholarship.
Note, you must use the instructions below to access Hathi Trust:

Go to the HathiTrust homepage.
Click on the yellow 'Log In' button.
Select FSU from the drop-down menu and click 'Continue.'
Enter your FSU ID and password and click 'Continue.'

FSU users have full-text access and downloading capabilities for those items in the public domain, including:

US federal government documents
Works published before 1923
Works still protected by copyright, but made available to HathiTrust with the permission of the copyright holder

See also: Research Guide: HathiTrust Digital Library

Abbreviation: hathi
Vendor: HathiTrust
Coverage: 1564–Current
Subjects: *General / Multi-Subject
Type: E-Book Collections, E-Journal Collections

Core Historical Literature of Agriculture
Cornell University collection of agricultural texts published between the early nineteenth century and the middle to late twentieth century. Full-text materials cover agricultural economics, agricultural engineering, animal science, crops and their protection, food science,forestry, human nutrition, rural sociology, and soil science. Scholars have selected the titles in this collection for their historical importance.

Personal Papers

To find the personal papers of a historical researcher, try searching Google Scholar for the researchers name with the additional keyword, "papers". Also use the OCLC FirstSearch (WorldCat) database to search by author to find published works by the researcher.

OCLC FirstSearch This link opens in a new window
The OCLC FirstSearch service supports research in a wide range of subject areas. At the heart of FirstSearch is WorldCat, containing more than 360 million records representing over 2 billion holding locations in libraries worldwide.
Abbreviation: oclcfs
Vendor: OCLC
Coverage: 1000 BCE–Current
Type: Indexes / Catalogs

Darwin Manuscripts
The Charles Darwin Papers in the Manuscripts Department of Cambridge University Library hold nearly the entire extant collection of Darwin’s working scientific papers. Paramount among these documents are Charles Darwin’s Evolution Manuscripts, which are being published online at the Cambridge Digital Library and simultaneously at the Darwin Manuscripts Project in collaboration with the Darwin Correspondence Project. This is a conceptually coherent set of over 30,000 digitised and edited manuscript pages, spanning 1835-1882.
Newton Papers
Cambridge University Library holds the largest and most important collection of the scientific works of Isaac Newton (1642-1727). They range from his early papers and College notebooks through to the ground-breaking Waste Book and his own annotated copy of the first edition of the Principia. These manuscripts along with those held at Trinity College Cambridge, King’s College Cambridge, the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Royal Society and the National Library of Israel have been added to the Unesco Memory of the World Register. As well as University Library material, our collection includes two important items from The Royal Society's collections - a manuscript copy of the Principia and a collection of Newton's correspondence.
Paul A.M. Dirac Papers
The Paul A. M. Dirac Collection includes material documenting his personal life and career as a student, premiere theoretical physicist, Nobel Prize winner, contributor to UK military research during World War II, noted lecturer and world traveler, holder of the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics chair at Cambridge University from 1932 until 1969, and Research Professor at Florida State University from 1972 until his death in 1984. The collection consists of correspondence, manuscripts of scientific papers and lectures, manuscript calculations, books, photographs, sound recordings, framed certificates, and realia.