He has done research on the early development of the natural sciences in Russia in the 18th century, biological warfare in the Soviet Union, the relationship of Russian literature to the natural sciences,Lysenkoism,Immanuel Velikovsky and pseudosciences, the early history of theatomic bombs and theCold War,Albert Einstein in Prague, history of global scientific languages, and the life ofDmitri Mendeleyev and the history of theperiodic table.[1]
How Lysenkoism became pseudoscience : Dobzhansky to Velikovsky, Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 45, 2012, pp. 443–468doi:10.1007/s10739-011-9287-3
with Paul Erickson, Judy Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturm: How reason almost lost its mind : the strange career of Cold War rationality, University of Chicago Press 2013
Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.[5]
The Pseudoscience Wars:Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
as editor with Peter Galison, David Kaiser: Routledge History of the Modern Physical Sciences, 4 vols., Routledge 2001
as editor with Karl Hall, Alexei Kojenikov: Intelligentsia Science: The Russian Century, 1860–1960, 2008
as editor with Helen Tilley, Gyan Prakash: Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility, Princeton, 2010
Gordin, Michael D. (2020).Einstein in Bohemia. Princeton University Press.ISBN978-0-691-17737-3.
Gordin, Michael D. (2021).On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience. Oxford University Press.ISBN9780197555767.