14.2: Identifying Source Types

Before you can fully interact with a source, you need to know what type of source you’re working with. In academic research, you might need to choose between several types of sources: online and print, primary, secondary, or tertiary, and scholarly or popular. In the early stages of a project, you might just be crossing your fingers and hoping you can find anything on your topic, but as you develop your research, you will find that the specific types of sources you use matter immensely. For example, a paper that includes only primary sources might lack the wider perspective needed to convince an audience that the topic at hand is truly relevant to them; similarly, a paper that includes only secondary or tertiary sources might strike readers as cold and impersonal. Great research strikes a balance. In many ways, the differences between sources comes down to two important characteristics: accessibility and quality.

Print v. Online

In terms of accessibility, online sources are the preferred choice for many students. These sources are not bound by physical location, they can be accessed at any time—day or night--and they are easy to find again. The drawback to online sources is the inconsistency of their quality. While the same can be said of print sources to some extent (some print sources are certainly of higher quality than others), these sources generally undergo a more rigorous process to achieve publication. By contrast, the openness of the internet means that anyone with a connection and an opinion can instantly share their ideas, regardless of whether they are technically qualified to do so.

Primary v. Secondary v. Tertiary

To determine whether a source is primary, secondary, or tertiary, look at the position of the source. If the source records a text, event, or experience without interpretation, it is a primary source. If the source interprets a text, event, or experience, it is a secondary source. If the source provides an overview of information about a given text, event, or experience, it is a tertiary source. As an example, a student writing a literary analysis of Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye would use the novel as their primary source, and they might also integrate an academic article that interprets the novel as a secondary source, and an encyclopedia page that provides an overview of interpretations and reactions to the novel as a tertiary source.

• Common Types of Primary Sources: Literary works, artifacts, audio recordings, diaries, emails, interviews, letters, newspaper articles (written at the time of a specific event), original documents, photographs, speeches, works of art, websites
• Common Types of Secondary Sources: Biographical works, commentaries, dictionaries and encyclopedias, magazine and newspaper articles, textbooks, websites
• Common Types of Tertiary Sources: Almanacs, bibliographies, dictionaries and encyclopedias, directories, guidebooks, indexes, abstracts and bibliographies used to locate primary and secondary sources, textbooks, manuals

Scholarly Sources v. Popular Sources

Another distinction you might be asked to make during the research process is one between popular and scholarly sources. Typically, instructors will expect students to engage with a combination of popular and scholarly sources, so you will need to feel comfortable identifying and evaluating both of these source types as you begin the research process. The chart below offers a few of the most salient differences to keep in mind as you choose between sources.

	Scholarly Sources	Popular Sources
Audience	Restricted to those with institutional access	Available to the general public
Authors	Experts in the field (faculty members, researchers, etc.); credentials easily located in articles	Journalists, freelance writers; credentials may or may not be easily located in the work
Publishers	Scholarly or professional organization	Commercial, for profit
Style	Specialized language specific to field; assumes prior knowledge about the topic; typically longer than popular works	Created for average readers short, sometimes entertaining pieces
General Characteristics	Narrow subject focus; little to no advertisement; often labeled as “journal” or “review”	Broad subject focus; contains ads/photos; sold at newsstands or bookstores

See this page for more help with categorizing sources from the Ohio State University online text, Choosing and Using Sources: A Guide to Academic Research.

Special Features of Scholarly Sources

Scholarly sources, particularly journal articles, can feel overwhelming when you first encounter them as a student. This is partially because, as indicated in the table above, they incorporate highly specific terminology and focus on complex ideas in ways that sometimes verge on inaccessible. In addition to jargon, they may also incorporate charts and statistics, which can feel difficult to interpret without prior training in the author’s field. Fortunately, scholarly articles follow a fairly standard structure that can help you to skim the text to decide whether or not a source will be helpful before committing to reading dozens of pages.

Journal articles are broken down into a few key sections, beginning with what’s known as an abstract. An abstract is a short paragraph that appears before the article itself (generally around 250 words) and summarizes the author’s goals, methods, and findings. Reading this overview, along with topic sentences and section headers, can give you a good sense of an article fairly quickly.

In addition to abstracts, journal articles include sections on purpose, methodology, limitations, and findings, along with either a Works Cited or References page (depending on the citation style) that lists all of the sources cited within the article. These last pages can be especially helpful because they can often point you toward additional high-quality sources that focus on the same topic from slightly different angles.