Differentiating kinds of sources

Page contents:

  • Primary and secondary sources

  • Scholarly and popular sources

  • Older and more current sources

Sources can include data from interviews and surveys, books and articles in print and online, websites, films, video and audio content, images, and more.

Primary and secondary sources

Primary sources provide firsthand knowledge; secondary sources report on or analyze the research of others. Primary sources are basic sources of raw information, including your own field research; films, works of art, or other objects you examine; literary works you read; and eyewitness accounts, photographs, news reports, and historical documents such as letters and speeches.

Secondary sources are descriptions or interpretations of primary sources, such as researchers’ reports, reviews, biographies, and encyclopedia articles.

Often what constitutes a primary or secondary source depends on the purpose of your research. A critic’s review of a film, for instance, serves as a secondary source if you are writing about the film but as a primary source if you are studying the critic’s writing.

Most research projects draw on both primary and secondary sources. For example, a research-based project on the effects of steroid use on Major League Baseball might draw on primary sources, such as players’ testimony to Congress, as well as secondary sources, such as articles or books by baseball experts.

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Scholarly and popular sources

Although nonacademic sources such as magazines and personal websites can help you get started on a research project, many college assignments call for you to depend more heavily on authorities in a field, whose work generally appears in scholarly journals in print or online.

Scholarly
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Popular
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Reproduced with permission. Copyright © 2016 Scientific American, a division of Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Title often contains the word Journal

Available mainly through libraries and library databases

Print periodicals have matte (not glossy) pages with few commercial advertisements

Little or no color; few illustrations

Authors identified with academic credentials

Journal usually does not appear in title

Available at newsstands or from a home Internet connection

Print periodicals have glossy pages with many advertisements

Full color; many illustrations

Authors are usually journalists or reporters hired by the publication, not academics or experts

Summary or abstract appears before beginning of article; articles are fairly long

Articles cite sources and provide bibliographies

Examples: Public Opinion Research Quarterly, Journal of the American Medical Association, Ecology and Society

No summary or abstract; articles are fairly short

Articles may include quotations but do not cite sources or provide bibliographies

Examples: Scientific American, The New Yorker, Salon

Many (but not all) scholarly sources are peer reviewed, which means that experts in the discipline read and approve every article before it is published in the journal.

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Older and more current sources

Most projects can benefit from both older, historical sources and more current ones. Some older sources are classics in their fields, essential for understanding the scholarship that follows them. Others are simply dated, though even these works can be useful to researchers who want to see what people wrote and read about a topic in the past. Depending on your purpose, you may rely primarily on recent sources (for example, if you are writing about a new scientific discovery), primarily on historical sources (for instance, if your project discusses a nineteenth-century industrial accident), or on a mixture of both. Whether a source appeared hundreds of years ago or this morning, evaluate it carefully to determine how useful it will be for you.

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