The ULS has a very large collection of books on topics in the history and philosophy of science.  There are many books that will be useful to researchers  that can be accessed through PittCat.  However, there are several series of books that were intentionally designed to act as a bridge between encyclopedia entries - which are usually brief, and focused on a well formed concept or person - and  full fledged research monographs which are often a fairly probing and in depth examination of a topic.  Three series of books where you may find material that is helpful are the Oxford Handbook series, the Blackwell Companion Series, and the Cambridge Companion series.  These collect longer articles by experts in the field that give extended treatment of the topic. A search query using the terms from the name of the series and a set of terms on the topic in which you are interested may yield a set of articles on your topic.

However, these series are not the only useful series of history and philosophy books available to you. You may want to explore your topic's array of literature for titles beyond these series.

A very useful feature of all of these types of literature is the bibliography.  It is quite common for the author of the article to list the sources for some aspects of her work.  They are located at the end of the encyclopedia entry, book chapter, or journal article.

Some examples of useful books are listed below.

PittCat is the main searching tool for all of the materials owned by the University Library System (ULS), including articles, books, ebooks, journal articles, ejournals, audio and video, digital images, government documents, microfilm and movies.

There are many books that will help you plan a paper in history or philosophy and will give examples and instructional suggestions that may be helpful.