The basic way in which historians identify Ranke's approach to history with their own – to the extent that they do so at all – is related to his use of archives. The location, analysis, and interpretation of records created during or close to the time of the events to be described are seen as essential to the historian's craft. If may well be helpful to locate and to consult later accounts and interpretations, but the first concern of the historian must be the effort to find contemporary records.

This approach to the research for and the writing of history has influenced the training of historians in the United States and throughout the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and also placed a premium on making records available. Locating, preserving, and utilizing archival materials have come to be central to the training of students as well as to the professional practice of historians. Governments and other institutions responded, at least to some extent, to the pressures created by this trend in scholarship. The modern system of archives, the development of finding aids for their use, the regularization of access procedures, and the concern for the collection of manuscripts in private hands for transfer into generally accessible institutions all received a major impetus from this perception of the historical discipline.

The practice of history as it has evolved in the century since Leopold von Ranke's death in 1886 would be inconceivable without the emphasis on archival research associated with his work.