OT: Research tips and tricks.

dbussell12 · #1 06-03-2025, 03:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sbfinley

Responding to another thread on the board, I'm finally motivated to ask a question I've been meaning to for a little while now. With as many researchers as we have on the board, it would be nice if some of them can provide their "best practices." I'm not a professional historian or researcher. I'm just a guy with a 9-5 who likes to research topics occasionally from the comfort of my couch. I graduated college over 20 years ago and my well worn copy of SABR's "How to do Baseball Research" is woefully out of date. Search engines like Google seemed to have amazingly regressed in the past 5-10 years and while it used to be easy to find links to 1st hand resources like newspaper articles with the popular search engines, they now seem to be bloated with AI overviews and links to information that barely even rhymes with my original search. A previous job provided me with JSTOR access, which was helpful at the time so I'm considering maybe getting access to that database again. At times I've had Newspaper.com subscriptions, but I've occasionally found it lacking.

So I'm curious. What resources are you guys using? Where do you normally start your search? Any helpful search tips/tricks?

Thanks all and happy collecting!

Hey Steven -- great to see a question like this on the board; how you just articulated it.

As a former academic, JSTOR can definitely be helpful but I actually find myself straying consistently further and further away from that kind of world into blog posts, old N54 threads, ChatGPT, and working with keywords. A timely query into ChatGPT asking for sources and experts on your information project will usually yield surprising results, professors, books; international researchers.

I tend to find the best foundations are usually already laid. Rarely is a field ever not already at least superficially explored by previous specialists, historians, archivists. John Thorn for me has been really important as a baseball historian in general; N54's archives are very well laid for obscure artifacts and finding provenance on specific teams and moments in time. Seamheads for me has been invaluable with my Cuban and Negro Leagues work.

Don't underestimate local, independently owned projects like Black Baseball in Virginia; the Southern Negro Leagues website and databases. Cooperstown library and Library of Congress are usually very forthcoming through requests you have to their database. Willingness and openness to exploring smaller, independently owned blogs and research projects renders, quite frequently for me, profound and interesting results.

Querying is key. Getting creative and becoming better and better with how you word your search terms and your inputs to GPT or another AI will render you better and better results. Experimenting with that and learning how to work with that as a tool is the key that opens the floodgates to discovery. I like to call it 'digital archaeology'. Sometimes just changing a single word in your search can turn a table or flip a stone to reveal something you didn't see before and need to see to connect the right dots and put the pieces together. Feel free to message me anytime to discuss. Great to see a fellow researcher on here and someone who loves digging deep.

In reference to the above, AI and sites like Wikipedia are always invaluable but doing the confirmation work through visiting cited sources and verifying the most up to date data is important work. Taking information at face value from a single source can put holes in work!

My background is Smithsonian NMAH in the baseball archives as well as grad work in philosophy, history, and cultural studies. I like to think I can assist here.

My best; thanks for asking this great question
David

sbfinley · #2 06-03-2025, 04:43 PM

Thanks guys. I guess with nearly 30 SABR publications on my bookshelf, I just finally pony up for a membership. I had no idea the archives or a basic newspapers.com subscription included.

sb1 · #3 06-03-2025, 05:57 PM

newspapers.com can take you down lots of rabbit holes, lots of good stuff can be found.

nat · #4 06-03-2025, 09:06 PM

Find a good book and go through the bibliography. If you know that it's a high-quality book you know that you're going to be able to trust their sources. The only real problem is that this method can only take you back in time.

JSTOR is wonderful; don't know how useful it is for baseball or how expensive it is (my access is through my employer), but back issues of gazillions of journals is great to have at your fingertips.

If you find an academic article that you want to read but can't get, you can try e-mailing the author. They'll probably send you a pdf.

Also - look up a book in the library that you think will be useful to you, and then look around in the stacks for other books near it. Doesn't always work (cataloguing seems to be a mysterious and dark art to me), and who knows if they've got anything else that would be helpful, but sometimes you'll discover books that you didn't know about this way.

Leon · #5 06-07-2025, 09:43 AM

I use this forum for some research, but then I go down a rabbit hole about some other thing, and 30 minutes later I get back to doing what I was doing!

I am sure that never happens to anyone else..

I have a fairly extensice hobby periodical library and someday I will start going through the mountains of info that isn't anywhere else. It's pretty cool reading about the cards from a longtime ago.

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