Using and Accessing Primary Sources

Chase those footnotes

Once you've identified a range of promising articles from your search, it's time to review their citations to find additional, likely older, references to seek out:

• In a historical (overview) article, what are the original sources cited as turning points or landmarks?
• In a classical article or original work, what references are they citing?

Some of these articles may be available in a major database, particularly if they are from the mid-twentieth century or more recent. If you start from PubMed (logged in with your OHSU credentials), you will find full-text articles via the Find @ OHSU button.

For older items, it never hurts to start with Google for a citation. But, with a notoriously unreliable algorithm, if you're not finding results, you may wish to search directly within one of the bigger digital libraries.

Excellent sites for locating digitized versions of full-text historical journals, books and other sources (particularly 1928 and earlier for copyright reasons):

• Medical Heritage Library
  View digitized, open access resources in this collaborative library in the history of healthcare and the health sciences
• National Library of Medicine Digital Collections
  Access online images from the historical collections of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Images include fine art, photographs, engravings, and posters that illustrate the social and historical aspects of medicine dating from the 15th to 21st century.
• New York Academy of Medicine Digital Collections
  Access NYAM's historical collection on the history of medicine and public health, including rare books, manuscripts, pharmaceutical trade cards, and more.
• Wellcome Collections
  Find thousands of freely licensed digital books, artworks, photos and images of historical library materials and museum objects from the Wellcome Collection.
• Hathitrust Digital Library
  Explore millions of digitized items from a collaborative of academic and research libraries around the world. HathiTrust offers reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. copyright law.

Changing terminologies, specialties and titles

• Be mindful of changing terminologies, and potentially of a change in fields or specialties: a topic might currently be associated with a specialty that didn't exist 100 or 200 years ago.
• If you can't find resources related to a term or keyword before a certain date range, there may have been a change in terminology around that time. What are other, more basic terms you can search for?
• This ALSO goes for journals: many scholarly journals, particularly those over 100 years old, have undergone multiple name changes over the years. Example, Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery was titled Transactions of the American Orthopedic Association in the nineteenth century. If you are searching for an old citation (especially 1800s) with no results, the journal may have previously published under a different name, and the citation has omitted this detail. Search Hathitrust, Medical Heritage Library or similar for the article title or author name to see if it comes up under a different publication name.

Language barriers

You will, at some point, likely run across citations written in languages other than English without published translations available. If it happens to be a language in which you do not have reading proficiency, there are some possible workarounds.

Find English-language commentaries on the original article:

• Google Scholar: search for the original article, then click "cited by" for a list of articles that cite the original. Sort by date to find one close to the original date of publication.
  • Alternative: search "author name" and "[general topic]", set the date range to ~ 5 years of publication to see if it turns up any commentaries.
• For older articles (pre-1920s), search Hathitrust, Medical Heritage Library or similar for the title or author within ~ 5 years of the original article's publication.
• Articles located with the above methods may not lead you to THE article you are seeking as a primary source, but it IS a primary source on how people were discussing its ideas at the time, how it was summarized, and how the author was situated with other researchers.

Find private translations of original works:

• You may want to try a broad internet search for the title, and look for results in theses or dissertations, on department websites, you'd be surprised! Look for .edu addresses in the results.
• In combination with other approaches, try running a PDF of the original article through Google Translate! You may be able to get the gist of the article. Your mileage may vary.

Additional resources

• How to Google for Primary Sources (PDF)

When in doubt, ask for help

Historical Collections & Archives staff are very experienced in tracing historical sources and helping to locate materials. It's our job! Reach out for help anytime you get stuck.

Submit a ticket to reach the first available staff member.