The Researcher's Rabbit Hole

Kelly Claytor
Jun 11, 2022
1 min read

Updated: Apr 2

Behind the Name

https://www.behindthename.com/

Looking for character names? This site has search functionality for name origin, ethnicity, and sometimes the story and meaning by the name. It also has a name generator--good for fantasy genres.

JSTOR Digital Library

https://www.jstor.org/

This is a digital library with access to more than 12 million articles, publications, images, and books. Authors are researchers, too! Create a free account for access.

Open Culture

https://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses

Take online courses from the world’s top universities for free. From learning archaeology or Sanskrit, to writing or concepts of physics, these MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are a convenient way to discover a host of topics useful for the researching writer.

Open Library

https://openlibrary.org/

This is a resource for publicly available books and other research materials. This free website provides access to digitized archives, historical books, and special collections of written works viewable online.

Past Maps

https://pastmaps.com/ (United States maps)

https://pastmap.org.uk/ (United Kingdom maps)

Deep in your historical research and need to know what street ran through the neighborhood in 1845? Try a "past map" website.

RefSeek

https://www.refseek.com/directory/

RefSeek is a web search engine for students and researchers that aims to make academic information easily accessible to everyone. RefSeek searches more than five billion documents, including web pages, books, encyclopedias, journals, and newspapers.