160 Theses and Counting: How Graduate Students Are Referencing AIP’s NBLA

A recent search for “Niels Bohr Library” in ProQuest’s Dissertations & Theses Global database returned 160 results, with the earliest citations dating to 1966—just four years after the library’s founding. While not comprehensive, this set of dissertations and theses offers a window into how AIP’s Niels Bohr Library & Archives supports graduate students work to expand the boundaries of knowledge. It also reveals part of our community of researchers engaged in dialog with our collections via citation.

Every citation is a point of connection. Each reference is part of a conversation with the voices and stories in our collections. I enjoy seeing how the body of unique and distinctive resources in our collection, particularly the oral histories of scientists spoken into the historical record, enter this active ongoing scholarly discourse. For each of these 160 researchers, the Niels Bohr Library & Archives will forever be connected to them, in a footnote at least, as part of a major research milestone of their lives.

A growing record of scholarly engagement

The chart below shows the number of dissertations and theses in this database citing the Niels Bohr Library & Archives in five-year increments from 1965. As our collections have expanded since the library’s founding in 1962, so too has their use in graduate research. The notable jump in citations during the 2010s aligns with the release of major portions our oral history transcripts online for the first time. Most of these citations reference our oral history interviews, underscoring their value to graduate research.

Early references to the library

The earliest thesis in the database to reference the Niels Bohr Library, the original name of the Niels Bohr Library & Archives, is Ray N. Lawson’s Thermography as Applied to Medicine , completed in 1966 for a Master of Science in Surgery at McGill University. Lawson likely didn’t consult any of the library’s rare or distinctive materials—instead, he appears to have used the collection to check references to published books and journal articles.

The first thesis to reference some of the library’s rare and unique materials appears to be Katherine Shen Chiang’s 1974 dissertation from the Graduate Library School at the University of Chicago, “The Invisible College in Nuclear Physics: 1920—1939 .” Shen Chiang references Yardley Beers ’ and Bruce Lindsay ’s unpublished manuscript autobiographies as sources in her argument for the key role correspondence between scientists played in advancing research in nuclear physics during that period.

Turning to look at some of the most recent dissertations referencing our collections, we can see a few different communities of users who are engaging with our resources. As one might expect, first and foremost our users are historians, but there is also a sizable set of scientists and researchers in other social science and humanities disciplines who are making use of our collections.

Historians as a primary user community

Not surprisingly, most of the dissertations referencing the NBLA are historians, and primarily historians of science.

Last year, Sia Paulsen cited two photos from our collection, including the photo below, and an oral history interview with Martin Schwarzschild in her 2025 master’s thesis, “Parity and Perseverance: The Story of Chien-Shiung Wu .” In her thesis, Paulsen uses that interview with Schwarzchild to explore the ways that Chien-Shiung Wu’s mentorship and guidance shaped his career and work at Brookhaven National Lab.

Also from last year, in “Nature’s Expressions: Thinking Race on the US South Seas Exploring Expedition (1838-1842) ,” William Morris Scates Frances references an 1986 oral history interview with Margaret Mayall . As he explained to me over email, “The fact that these transcripts were full-text searchable online was crucial. Without that access, I doubt I would have stumbled on the small detail that ended up playing such an important role in my thesis and in the Uncovering Pacific Pasts exhibition .” Open online access has enabled much broader use of our collections as a basis of evidence for serendipitous discovery in research.

Several examples from 2024 dissertations are similarly instructive as to scholarly uses of AIP oral histories.

Abigail Holmes’ dissertation, “Climbing the Cosmic Distance Ladder ,” cites a 2020 oral history interview with Wendy Freedman . Holmes quotes Freedman’s oral history as a resource for understanding why her work on the Hubble constant had been dismissed in the late 1990s. This illustrates how details from oral histories can provide context and nuance for understanding how a scientific breakthrough came about.

Núria Muñoz Garganté’s dissertation, “Philip Anderson Against the Big Machines, or How Emergence Made Its Way Into Physics ,” opens with acknowledgments noting that “the breadth of materials used in this work were made possible by the American Institute of Physics Grant-In-Aid for research in the history of the physical sciences .” She goes on to explain that “This generous grant facilitated visits to the AIP Niels Bohr Library & Archives and the Princeton University Archives, crucial in gathering essential material for the project.” This kind of acknowledgment happens in a number of the 160 dissertations and theses, and it testifies to the role AIP plays in providing both scholarly and financial resources that enable work in our community. Garganté draws on oral histories with Philip W. Anderson from 2000 . She uses these interviews, along with other sources, to carefully examine the extent to which Anderson had developed of his famous “More is Different” argument by 1967. Her research builds a case for the role the “More is Different” argument played in introducing ideas about emergence into physics research. Much as was the case with Holmes’ dissertation, this example shows the valuable nuance and texture oral history interviews can provide for triangulating when and how a specific theory and argument originated.

Victoria Jane Louise Fisher, in her dissertation,“Getting Down to Brass & Wax: The Material Culture of Physics at Canadian Universities, 1890-1939 ,” cites a 1986 oral history interview with D. Allan Bromley . Fisher uses that interview as a source for explaining characteristics of the particle physics research program at Queens University in the late 1930s and 1940s. In this case, we see the role that an oral history interview can play in helping explain and contextualize the formation of culture and communities of scientists. You can see Bromley along with fellow graduates from Queens University in the image from our visual archives below.

Growing use of collections by working scientists

While the majority of this set of references come from historians of science, it is exciting to see a number of researchers working in the physical sciences also making use of our collections. In the three cases that follow, we observe how physical scientists cite AIP’s oral histories to introduce additional context into debates about precedence in the development of the theories and frameworks underlying their work.

In their 2024 Iowa State University thesis, Search for the Rare Charm Meson Decays D0 → h −h( ′ )+e +e − , high energy physicist Shuaiyan Kang references a 1997 interview of Wolfgang Panofsky to explain that “In the summer of 1974, Sam Ting’s group at BNL found the particle J and kept it secret to validate the finding.” In this case, this oral history is used to document knowledge that had not previously been publicly announced.

Similarly, in his 2024 Princeton University dissertation “AI-Based Prediction and Control of Tokamaks: Combining Simulations and Experimental Data ” plasma physicist Joseph Albert Abbate references a 2007 oral history with J.B. Taylor. Albert Abbate quotes Taylor’s oral history to provide further context for what Taylor referred to as the “weird machine called a Stellarator” at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab.

In his 2022 West Virginia University thesis “From Evaluating the Performance of Approximations in Density Functional Theory to a Machine Learning Design ,” Pedram Tavazohi references a 1967 oral history with Vladimir Fok as evidence that, when he was involved in developing the Hartree-Fock (HF) approximation, Fok “did not know about the spin until it was later introduced by the relativistic Dirac.” Tavazohi also cites a 1962 oral history oral history with Llewellyn Hilleth Thomas as evidence for Thomas’ precedence in deriving the Thomas-Fermi Equation.

In her 2023 Open University dissertation in mathematics, “The Influence of Edmund Taylor Whittaker as Mathematician and Teacher ,” Alison Maidment cites a 1978 oral history interview with William McCrea as part of an explanation for how Whittaker’s techniques were translated “into the language of differential geometry.”

Across these cases, we see scientists and mathematicians using the oral histories in somewhat similar ways to the historians of science: as resources to further contextualize and understand aspects of how we came to our current scientific understanding of an issue. Each example shows that the richness of our oral history collection is not only of use to historians, but also to scientists who are interested in more fully representing and exploring the intellectual lineages in which they are working.

Uses of collections outside science and the history of science

Beyond scientists and historians of science, we also find scholars in other fields making use of the collections. The following three recent examples each illustrate other roles that our collections play in supporting the development of new knowledge.

Visual artist Bridget Smith used two items from our oral history collection for her 2022 dissertation at the Royal College of Art in the United Kingdom. “Realising the Unreal: Swedenborg, Photography and Vision(s) ” includes a reproduction and analysis of Niels Bohr’s last blackboard drawing from our visual archives along with a discussion of a 1962 oral history with Bohr . That blackboard drawing, which Bohr chalked out the day before he died, and the oral history from our collection “where it is noted, like stage directions, when Bohr moves to the board to make his drawing,” documents Bohr’s impression of Einstein’s “light box” thought experiment. That thought experiment becomes one of the central jumping-off points for Smith’s approach to engage with contemporary notions of light in physics which informed the development of her public art commission “Thinking Light” for the University of Oxford’s physics building.

Daniel Wiley’s 2021 Media, Culture, and Communication dissertation from NYU “Time Machined: Clocks, Values, and Digital Computation ” references our 1963 oral history with I.I. Rabi and oral histories with Norman Ramsey . Rabi’s oral history comes up as part of an explanation of how Rabi learned about atomic and molecular beam deflection techniques in the 1920s. Wiley uses a passage from Ramsey’s oral history to note that the National Board of Standards thought that the technique Ramsey and Rabi had conceived of in the late 1930s to define a new time and frequency standard was “a little complicated.” These both play a part in Wiley’s larger story about the role the development of the atomic clock in changing international standards for time. This all works toward his broader exploration of the role that the history of clock time played in the development of digital computers.

Jungkyu Suh’s 2022 dissertation in business administration at Duke University, “Essays on Science and Innovation ,” cites a 1985 interview with Amnon Yariv and a 1984 oral history interview with Martin Stickley . Block quotes from both interviews show up in a rather detailed appendix to this dissertation on “historical details on laser science in the Soviet Union.” Shu uses the history of the U.S. laser industry after the Cold War as a context to develop a quantitative model for how government and industry research investments relate to the innovativeness of startups.

The thirteen theses and dissertations I explored here are just the tip of the iceberg, but they are valuable as points of entry for understanding the vital role NBLA collections play in advancing research. If you are interested in exploring that set of theses and dissertations, you can see references for them in a collection in my Zotero library . I find this set of dissertations and theses to be a useful way to explore some of the impact that AIP’s Niels Bohr Library & Archives is having.

I’m looking forward to continuing to track, follow, and share some of the ways that researchers are engaging with and making use of our collections in graduate research. Beyond that, we are always interested in hearing about and featuring ways that our collections are being used by all sorts of other user communities as well. So, if you have different ways you have used our collections, I would be happy to hear about them (my email is on my bio page.) Stay tuned for more stories about the creative ways that people are using our collections by subscribing to our newsletters .