Finding academic authors from diverse backgrounds or communities can be a challenge. This is not because there isn't a rich scholarly community of authors from backgrounds and identities of diverse groups, but rather that the search tools we use do not generally include identifiers related to a researcher's ethnic, sexual, or gender identity, if they are a person with a disability, or any other indication of their positionality relative to these communities.
The State University of New York (SUNY) has a good guide to implicit bias in the library's search tools, and some recommendations for how to find information authored by people from outside of the predominantly white, cisgender, colonial perspective.
In addition, here is a short video demonstrating one possible strategy for identifying sources from diverse authors using the Alternative Press Index (API) database. Although this strategy is imperfect, some researchers may find the approach helpful.
As always, if you have questions about this or other topics related to library research, please feel free to get in touch with us.
