We report here an investigation of selectively delta‐doped strained InGaAs/GaAs quantum wells. Electronic structures of the systems were calculated by self‐consistently solving the Schro¨dinger and Poisson equations and the calculations revealed a systematic variation of the band structure as the delta sheet moved away from the center of the well to the edge and finally to the barrier. The results were found to be in agreement with our photoluminescence (PL) measurements. For center‐doped samples, band‐gap renormalization was found to be strong from the PL data, and our realistic random‐phase approximation calculation for the heavily doped sample is in excellent agreement with the PL data. The radiative lifetimes were measured to be around 450 ps for all the samples, and surprisingly they vary very little from sample to sample although the wave‐function overlap was considerably different for some samples. We also report Shubnikov–de Haas (SdH) measurements on the two barrier doped cases. For the heavily doped sample (A12132), two oscillation signals were detected and they were identified as two upper subbands. The measured electron densities were in very good agreement with the self‐consistent calculation. Illumination did not make any difference to the measured densities. For the low‐doped sample (A12025), however, the measured electron density before illumination is much smaller than the calculated, and illumination was found to make a large difference. ©1996 American Institute of Physics.