OT: Research tips and tricks.

[dbussell12]

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 I graduated college over 20 years ago and my well worn copy of SABR's "How to do Baseball Research" is woefully out of date.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