"Historiography" is basically "the history of history." It's how historians have argued about history over the years. So it's a good place to start if you are thinking about doing history in a serious way, but it is also somewhat daunting because there is a lot to learn and a lot of historiography can feel pretty theoretical and obtuse if you are not steeped in these old academic debates.

For the history of science, I would recommend looking into how historians of science talk about doing their work, and what the goals and methods of the history of science are. These are often quite different from how scientists talk about their own history, and very different from how history is integrated into a scientific curriculum. The goal of history in a science class, for example, is to situate the future-scientist in understanding how the current theories were developed, so it is a "march of winners" (and usually a few big names who are meant to represent what it means to be a scientist — so in a physics/astronomy class you get the classic Copernicus, Tycho, Kepler, Galileo, Newton procession). In the serious study of the history of science, we don't assume that there is a smooth transition between old ideas and new ideas (often the new ideas are quite different than the old ones, even when they use the same terms), and we also are interested in the "losers" of history as well (you can't really understand Galileo without understand Christoph Clavius, for example; Clavius was the dominant Jesuit astronomer in Galileo's time, and would have written the text books that Galileo himself would have learned from, and was the chief arbiter of how the Church would respond to Galileo's claims, and so he's super important to understanding who Galileo thought he was talking to and how his claims were received). Historians of science are also very interested in peeling back the practice of science from the idea that it is just about "big ideas" or "big discoveries" done by "big men." There's always been a lot more to scientific practice than that version of things, if you care about how it actually happened.

ANYWAY. The above are just some examples of "baseline" historiographical assumptions by historians of science. There are many more ways to think about it. If I were preparing a very basic historiographical overview for someone looking to approach this topic seriously, it might include:

• Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions — a place to start and not to end. Kuhn is the most famous philosopher/historian of science by far but that is because he started a lot of conversations, not because he answered them. Most historians of science today are NOT Kuhnians. But he is a very useful introduction to thinking about what makes the history of science difficult to do, and some of his basic methodological arguments (like, you should try to understand how historical scientists understood their own work on its own terms — don't approach the past looking to show whether it is right or wrong according to modern scientific understanding, as that is not very productive/useful) hold up. Take his "model" of scientific revolutions with a grain of salt; most fields don't exhibit quite the dynamics that Kuhn argues for. And a lot of it is muddled.

• Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and development of a scientific fact — is a precursor to Kuhn (a lot of people think Kuhn basically ripped off Fleck), and is worth reading after Kuhn, just to see how the same ideas are fleshed out in somewhat different (and arguably more sensitive) ways.

• Stephen Shapin and Simon Schaffer, The Leviathan and the Air-Pump — a now-classic historical study of arguments about the nature of the vacuum in 17th century England. Even if you have no interest in 17th-century England, there are tons of methodological approaches being espoused here (you can roughly think of this approach as being very influenced by the SSK — Social Study of Knowledge — school of thinking), including how to think about how historical make claims to truth, the meaning and role of experiments and instruments, and the social nature of scientific discourse (who is allowed in a laboratory, and who is not? who is allowed to attend scientific meetings, and who is not? etc.). Overall a hugely influential book on how historians of science of all periods work today.

• Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France — Latour is a sociologist/anthropologist, but a lot of the modern history of science is heavily influenced by insights from qualitative sociology and anthropology, and all historians of science have read this book. You don't have to love Latour (lots of historians don't) but knowing about how Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is applied to the historical study of science is very important to making sense of a lot of modern history of science.

The above are just sort of the bog-standard texts that all historians of science will have probably read at some point (usually in graduate school). Beyond that you start to get into much more subject-specific histories. So if you were interested in the history of physics, you'd want to look at the writings of Peter Galison and his students (of which I am one). If you were interested in the history of biology, there is a whole other literature there depending on which angles you were looking at. And so on and so on, for any subfield or approach you can imagine.

Now, you're saying, crap. I didn't ask for how to become a graduate student in this field, and I'm not going to read 80 books before I start on my project. I hear you. But I would take a look (even a skim) at some of these resources. At the very least, read Kuhn, because he provides a LOT of discussions about how (and why) to do history of ideas, and that sounds relevant to what you are interested in.

Separately, there are books on how to do history in general — not relating to the history of science. These cover things like, how to think critically about primary sources, what are primary and secondary sources, how to document your work through citation, etc. I believe the FAQ has some recommendations for these. This kind of stuff is useful (most of it is unsurprising, I think), but in a way I would emphasize the other historiographical stuff (e.g. Kuhn) a bit more. Because the hard part about doing history is not downloading all of the papers on a given topic and tracing through the footnotes — scientists do that all the time as part of their literature reviews — or going to an archive and saying, "show me all of the letter in this folder by this old scientist." The hard part is making sense of these things in a way that doesn't commit serious errors (like attributing a modern understanding to a historical figure who thought about it very differently). And that's where the historiography will come into play.

Kuhn, for example, has an excellent discussion about why it is so difficult to answer question, "when was oxygen discovered, and by who?" You'd think it was simple, and the textbook version makes it seem like you can say, "on this date, Lavoisier or Priestly understood oxygen existed," but the reality is that the understanding of it emerged in pieces over a protracted period of time, and didn't "cohere" until a much later date. As a result it's one of those things that probably doesn't have a distinct moment of discovery, but rather the idea of its "discovery" is sort of a backwards, after-the-fact narrative framing of what was actually a more complex and muddy process. This kind of stuff is important, because the "bad narrative" history of science gives us a poor understanding of the reality of how science works (and the consequences of that can be more than intellectual — no historian of science that I know was surprised that the CDC's understanding of how COVID-19 worked took a while to work out, but you can see that lots of people accustomed to a model of "scientists just get the right answer" lost a lot of faith seeing that play out in real time about something they cared about).