Women in History: Women of Science Research Tools

Below are listed some key resources for this class. Other related resources may be found in our Subject Research Guides. 

The most important general biographical tools are found within our CREDO search database. CREDO is an easy-to-use tool for preliminary research. One can search in hundreds of encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauruses, quotations, and subject-specific titles, as well as over 200,000 images and audio files and nearly 100 videos.

CREDO can be searched from the first search box on our Facts/Definitions page.

NOTE:  "Public domain" images may be located and utilized without copyright concerns from the Google Images database.

NOTE:  Wikipedia provides crowdsourced information on many topics ... which can be a good source of common knowledge ... but one must be very careful to critique the accuracy and reliability of such information. The resources listed above do have guaranteed authority and accuracy.

A paper copy of the Dictionary of Scientific Biography ... the most scholarly and comprehensive encyclopedia of scientific biographies ... is found in the library on a shelf under the North windows. This work only covers deceased scientists.

Journal articles about women scientists can be located using a variety of journal indexes, each with their own subject coverage and other navigational options.

You would search for names and/or subjects such as "women scientists" or "women and science".

• Academic Search Complete -  Articles from core journals in many fields; most with fulltext. Not comprehensive.
• Scopus. Articles in science, mathematics, medicine, technology, and the social sciences. Scopus provides citation tracking and identifies high impact articles.
• America: History and Life may cover women scientists from additional perspectives. (now use Central Index)
• Education Research Complete  Topics covered include all levels of education from early childhood to higher education, and educational specialties such as multilingual education, health education, and testing.
• ERIC  The Education Resources Information Center provides access to literature and resources, including content from journals in the Current Index of Journals in Education and Resources in Education Index.

SUBJECT SEARCHING:

One quick way to discover our local books and films in this area is to run a Book catalog subject search on "women scientists".

This search produced 19 titles with major emphasis on this topic.  Remember that many other books may contain chapters on this topic, and they will not appear under this specific subject heading. You may want to utilize the facets on the right side of the screen to target various sub-divisions such as by topic, subject heading, date, author, language, or geographic region.

Expand your results using a more comprehensive I-Share subject search of our 86 consortial state libraries produces 891 titles under this subject heading. You can use the facets on the right side of the screen to target various sub-divisions of these results. 

KEYWORD SEARCHING:

You can perform a search on the person's name, but you will only find entire books written about the person or by the person.

To find books that contain mentions of your person:

A keyword search of "women scientists biography" produced 17 local results that might include chapters about the person. An I-Share keyword search of this topic resulted in 653 entries that might include chapters about the person.

LIMIT RESULTS: You may want to utilize the facets on the right side of the screen to target various sub-divisions such as by topic, subject heading, date, author, language, or geographic region.

News about women in science can be found in various types of news resources.

Our News Resources page lists some key newspaper aggregators, some specific newspapers, selected TV News items, and a selection of RSS news streams.