Biographical information can be found on the internet. However, when you use them academically, you have to gain accurate information by referring to several reliable sources which you can clearly specify.
The information about historical figures and also stil-living persons who made remarkable achievements can be found in general biographical dictionaries, which cover wide ranges of fields and eras, and also in encyclopedias.
General biographical dictionaries and encyclopedias cover the information about the peoples whose achievements are already recognized as historical, so the completeness of the data on people in our time tends to be not enough. In such cases, Who’s Who and other similar resources which cover particularly still-living people are useful. Who was Who and other resources specialized in people who recently past away should also be referred to.
Waseda University also holds country-specific Who’s Who. You can find them by searching WINE with key words such as "Who's Who" or "Who was Who".
There are so many people who made remarkable achievements in specific fields but are not included in general biographical dictionaries or who's who. In such cases, the biographical sources specialized in the fields should be referred to.
Not only from biographical dictionaries, biographical information sometimes can be obtained from dictionaries, almanacs, and handbooks of specific fields.
Besides biographical dictionaries and who’s who, the materials written about specific persons such as biographies, critical essays, and memoires are also helpful, especially when you try to find detailed biographical information. To find such sources, books listed below are useful.
If you search for the last and the first name of the person you are interested in with the Subject search from Advanced search on WINE, you can look for the books written about the person. Click here to see an example of a search for Sanae Takata.
The sources we could not introduce here can be searched with the materials below.