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Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law Interns Guide: Finding People

Tools for Completing Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law Projects

Finding Experts on a Subject

The best way to find a speaker or panelist on a specific subject is to find someone who has published extensively in that field. A few quick ways to find authors by subject are to:

  1. Locate an Oxford Bibliographies entry on-topic and see who gets cited.
  2. Search the topic in one of the subject-appropriate databases
  3. Search Google Scholar and Google Books on the topic

Think tanks are another fruitful source of experts by subject. For help finding an authoritative one in the field, start with Penn Libraries' guide to think tanks. You can also Google "think tank" and "(subject of interest)" -- just be sure to vet the organization by checking their About page, evaluating their members' other affiliations, and searching for any criticism of their credibility

Finding Contact Information

When looking for contact information, the most comprehensive tool is the Leadership Connect (below), which provides contact and biographical information for a wide range of people in government, business, law, media, and the nonprofit sector. It also allows for browsing by type of person (e.g. law deans), affiliation (e.g. alma mater), or industry. 

In addition to Leadership Connect, consider:

  • Directories for businesses and nonprofits, available through Penn Libraries.
  • Speaker bureaus and agencies
  • Twitter, as people may be easier to contact through a direct message
  • LinkedIn, if you can identify a connection point between you and the person of interest
  • Adding "cv" to your Google search, as they often include email or mailing addresses

When trying to find an email address for a member of government, you may be unable to locate a direct address. Members of Congress in particular hide their personal emails in order to encourage all communication to go through their websites' constituent forms. If that's the case, Leadership Library will generally have an email address for a chief of staff, main assistant, communications director, or director of scheduling, who can be contacted to forward the message to the intended recipient.

For the really difficult to find people, there are some advanced email reverse-engineering tips in this helpful LLRX article, but don't feel you need to go this far. If a person can't be located using one of the methods above, it's reasonable to pass that one on to your project supervisor for additional advice.

Finding People Internationally

Finding people internationally can be a much bigger challenge than locating them within the US, since a lot of these tools will not provide information beyond US borders. 

However, you can get pretty far with creative Googling. Here are a few frequently-useful strategies:

  • Governments, universities and other public organizations often have directories, which may not be crawled by Google but can be searched internally. For example, you can search for an Australian government employee by name or find staff by department in Australia's Government Directory.
  • Many governments are moving toward open access to information, and have "transparency" or "open government" portals which will link you to the contact information for agencies and their employees, e.g. the United Kingdom's Open Government Partnership. 
  • Speakers and presenters will often put email addresses or other contact information on the documents they present at meetings, symposia, colloquia, etc. If you can find evidence of your party's having presented at an event, look for any websites related to the event and see if documents are available there. Another way to find these documents are to search for the person's name and/or the title of the presentation, plus filetype:.pdf or filetype:.ppt.