Often, an important step in your research is to determine whether a source you intend to use is a primary, secondary, or tertiary source. You may be given an assignment that requires you to use a particular kind of source; it is thus necessary to know how to identify them. This page defines primary, secondary, and tertiary sources and provides examples of each.
NOTE: Whether a particular source should be considered primary, secondary, or tertiary depends on your research focus. For example, Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie, published in eighteenth-century France, was an encyclopedia, which would generally be categorized as a tertiary source. Scholars today, however, use the Encyclopédie as a primary source to study the ideas and views of Enlightenment thinkers
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Primary Sources
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Secondary Sources |
Tertiary Sources |
- Provide a firsthand account of an event or activity.
- Generated by the people directly involved.
- Are the original materials on which further research is based.
- Information in a primary source has not been subject to interpretation, analysis, or evaluation.
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- Offer interpretations, analyses, evaluations, or summaries of primary and other secondary sources.
- Generally written after the event or activity discussed and are not based on direct observation or involvement in that event or activity.
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- Collect, synthesize, and categorize primary and secondary literature rather than reporting or commenting on an event or activity.
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Examples:
- Artifacts (e.g. tools, pottery, coins, furniture, clothing, fossils)
- Photographs and drawings
- Works of art (e.g. paintings, plays, literature)
- Memoirs and autobiographies
- Books, magazines, and newspaper articles (written by people who have witnessed or participated in the actual event)
- Patents
- Empirical data (presented in conference proceedings or journal articles)
- Interviews
- Diaries
- Letters
- Speeches
- Government records
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Examples:
- Monographs
- Journal articles (those that do not present new research results)
- Theses and dissertations
- Biographies
- Commentaries and criticisms
- Magazine and newspaper articles (those that are not based on direct observation or participation)
- Textbooks (may also be considered tertiary sources)
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Examples:
- Encyclopedias
- Dictionaries
- Textbooks
- Almanacs
- Bibliographies
- Chronologies
- Handbooks
Many of these examples are also considered secondary sources, depending on the context. |
Original source: http://libresources.wichita.edu/sources.