While looking through the last three years of the journal Enterprise & Society, it is obvious that more historians have incorporated electronic databases into their research within the last year than in previous years, but I am not sure why. Maybe the editors have relaxed their restrictions on databases (if there ever were any), or the author’s have been more transparent about what sources they are using. Or maybe there just are more databases being used in these later articles. The journal’s standard bibliography of works cited is parsed out by the various types of sources used, and while some articles include databases in the “primary sources” category, there is no specific heading for electronic resources.

In Sept 2013’s issue, Matthew David Mitchell searches Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database in his article, “‘Legitimate Commerce’ in the Eighteenth Century: The Royal African Company of England Under the Duke of Chandos, 1720–1726.” By searching the database with the parameters of 1698 – 1807, Matthew was able to quantify the number of slaves brought by independent British slave traders to the Americas, in addition to those brought by the Royal African Company. I actually had not heard of this database before, so its inclusion in the references was informative in itself.

This month, in Sept 2014’s issue, Paula Cruz-Fernández takes her research in another direction in her article,  “Marketing the Hearth: Ornamental Embroidery and the Building of the Multinational Singer Sewing Machine Company.” While the author cites many historical periodicals, such as Godey’s Lady Book and Harper’s Bazaar, she also is clear about how she accessed these sources. Cruz-Fernández provides documentation in her footnotes, as well as in her works cited, that she used Cornell University’s Home Economics Archive: Research, Tradition and History archive, also known as HEARTH. By providing readers with this information, the author makes her methodology somewhat more known and transparent. It also allows the reader to learn of such an online database that may not have been previously known.

There are only four more articles that explicitly reference online databases as sources in Enterprise & Society and all are from 2014. It seems like historians are becoming more comfortable with citing databases when accessing historical periodicals and data, which is something that we as historians should be doing more often anyway. By being more transparent with our research, we can help each other learn of new sources and online archives that can only benefit the breadth and quality of all of our research.