He has published extensively on measurement, gender and technology, women in engineering, and histories of patenting.
[2][3][4] Gooday's PhD dissertation was on 'Precision Measurement and the Genesis of Physics Teaching Laboratories in Victorian Britain' and he (jointly) won the 1988-9 British Society for the History of Science Singer Prize for his essay on this topic.
[6] In 2014 he won the British Society for the History of Science Pickstone prize for his co-authored (with Stathis Aropostathis) book Patently Contestable: Electrical Technologies and Inventor Identities on Trial in Britain The awarding panel described the book as a 'superbly scholarly volume [which] offers a richly wrought set of case studies of electrical technologies including telephony, incandescent lighting, electrical power and wireless communication in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries'.
[7] He has led a number of research projects sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, including projects on: telecommunications and intellectual property in the First World War,[8] telecommunications and hearing loss,[9] and electrification of country houses [10][11] His research on hearing loss and domesticating electricity has (respectively) been used to inform museum exhibitions based in the Leeds Thackray Medical Museum and the Minneapolis Bakken Museum.
The royalties from his recent book on the history of hearing loss (authored with Professor Karen Sayer) will be split between the charity ' Action on Hearing Loss' and the National Deaf Children's Society.