History Center » Secondary Literature
Finding Books
You can search for books published by academic presses on WorldCat.
The search boxes have accompanying drop-down menus with a default setting for "Keyword." Change the setting from "Keyword" to "Publisher," and enter the word "university" in the accompanying search box. This will retrieve search results from publishers that have the word "university" in their company name, such as Stanford University Press and Oxford University Press.
In the search results, click on the link, "Libraries Worldwide" to see if a particular book is at Stanford. Alternately, you can see if a particular item from the search results is at Stanford by checking the Searchworks catalog.
If you are interested in an item that is not at Stanford, you might be able to retrieve it through DocXpress, Lane Medical Library's interlibrary loan program.
Finding Articles
The major peer-reviewed journals in the history of medicine are:
- Bulletin of the History of Medicine (Johns Hopkins University)
- Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (Oxford University)
Articles sometimes also appear in other scholarly journals that are not focused exclusively on medical history. You can search for articles that appear in any of these journals using PubMed.
In PubMed, click on the "Limits" button above the search box, and select "Historical Article" from the "Type of Article" list before performing a search.
Finding Dissertations
PhD dissertations sometimes include a literature review on their topic. These reviews can be helpful in building your bibliography.
Dissertations can be searched by topic using ProQuest.
Tracking Citations
Once you have generated a list of books and articles, you can further build your bibliography by investigating where those books and articles have been cited in other books and articles.
Searching for citations is possible using Web of Science.
Consulting Reference Works
The Stanford Medical History Center carries encyclopedias, chronologies, necrologies, and other standard reference sources in the history of medicine, including:
- Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine by W.F. Bynum and Roy Porter (New York: Routledge, 1993).
- Encyclopedia of Medical History by Robert E. McGrew (New York: Macmillan Press, 1985).
- A Chronology of Medicine and Related Sciences by Leslie T. Morton and Robert J. Moore (Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing, 1997).
- The Greatest Benefit to Mankind by Roy Porter (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 1997).
Reference works can provide a broad overview of a topic, and also furnish a starting bibliography.
Using Listservs
To further build a bibliography, it is possible to post an inquiry or review past postings on either of the following listservs:
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