Writing Papers for Me

 Research is always categorized as primary, secondary, or tertiary.

1. Primary research you undertake yourself.
   

   Some definitions of primary sources:

• Primary sources are original materials on which other research is based
• They are usually the first formal appearance of results in the print or electronic literature (for example, the first publication of the results of scientific investigations is a primary source.)
• They present information in its original form, neither interpreted nor condensed nor evaluated by other writers.
• They are from the time period (for example, something written close to when what it is recording happened is likely to be a primary source.)
• Primary sources present original thinking, report on discoveries, or share new information.

Figure 1. This image is a primary source. I went on the web, searched out the medieval manuscript I wanted, and then was able to examine it digitally. I can then include a discussion of the piece and my conclusions about it given my own reserach focus. Found in: Index of Medieval Medical Manuscripts:  Armenian MSS. Bible. N.T. Gospels. Armenian. Gladzori Avetaran. [Glajor Gospel]. [between 1300 and 1307] Arm. ms. 1 p. 108. Biomed Library, UCLA

Some examples of primary sources.
These include:

• scientific journal articles reporting experimental research results
• proceedings of Meetings, Conferences and Symposia.
• technical reports
• dissertations or theses (may also be secondary)
• patents
• sets of data, such as census statistics
• works of literature (such as poems and fiction)
• diaries
• autobiographies
• interviews, surveys and fieldwork
• letters and correspondence
• speeches
• newspaper articles (may also be secondary)
• government documents
• photographs and works of art
• original documents (such as birth certificate or trial transcripts)
• Internet communications on email, listservs, and newsgroups

Some examples of primary reserach:

• You interview your grandmother and four of her contemporaries about the clichés and terms people used when she was a girl.
• Working with a partner, you make a study of the differences in graffiti found in the men's and women's restrooms on campus and in town.
• You make a collection of ghost stories and campfire songs students remember hearing when camping with the scouts and others when they were kids.
• You go online and find images of medical procedures found in medieval manuscripts. This allows you to describe the medieval iconography of illness and healing.
• You go to several newspapers and, working with their archives, find articles by which you can compare the language used by when discussing the same recent political event.
• You check our library's special collection and Lancaster's Historical Society to see what documents were produced by Afro-Americans in Lancaster prior to the 20th century.

2. Secondary research you find in libraries, on the web, and in other storage facilities.

Secondary sources are less easily defined than primary sources. What some define as a secondary source, others define as a tertiary source. Nor is it always easy to distinguish primary from secondary sources. A newspaper article is a primary source if it reports events, but a secondary source if it analyses and comments on those events. In science, secondary sources are those which simplify the process of finding and evaluating the primary literature. They tend to be works which repackage, reorganize, reinterpret, summarise, index or otherwise "add value" to the new information reported in the primary literature. More generally, secondary sources

Some Definitions of Secondary Sources:
These materials

• describe, interpret, analyze and evaluate the primary sources
• comment on and discuss the evidence provided by primary sources
• are works which are one or more steps removed from the event or information they refer to, being written after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.

Some examples of secondary sources:
These include

• bibliographies (may also be tertiary)
• biographical works
• commentaries
• dictionaries and encyclopedias (may also be tertiary)
• dissertations or theses (more usually primary)
• handbooks and data compilations (may also be tertiary)
• history
• indexing and abstracting tools used to locate primary & secondary sources (may also be tertiary)
• Periodical articles, particularly in disciplines other than science (may also be primary). Do you know the difference between journals and magazines?
  • A magazine is a periodical written for a popular audience. It may have a somewhat specialized focus (Psychology Today, Popular Mechanic), but any layperson interested in the subject is likely to find the material accessible.
  • A journal is a scholarly publication (usually edited by people at a university or learned society, sometimes by a commercial firm) whose articles are written by specialists in the field. Such articles are peer reviewed by other specialists, an article's methodology and the quality of the scholarship are vetted, and the piece usually goes through a revision process prior to publication.
• monographs (other than fiction and autobiography)
• newspaper and popular magazine articles (may also be primary)
• review articles and literature reviews
• textbooks (may also be tertiary)
• treatises/works of criticism and interpretation

Here, we have people writing about something. A reporter writes about a book that's recently been published, for example, or a scholar writes about her research, etc.

Examples of secondary research.
You find the following:

• A book on clichés and slang used by women between 1930-50.
• Two articles and three books discussing ghost stories and campfire songs told by Girl Scouts.
• A PBS program on graffiti posted on the web or shown on T.V (You take careful notes and TIVO the program for later reference if it's not on the web.)
• Studies written by others about early writing by Afro-Americans in Pennsylvania.
• The Wellcome Library's site (England's premier medical library), do a search, and find an article by Fernando Salmón discussing the iconography of pain and medieval medicine that the library used as part of an exhibition called 'Pain: Passion, compassion, sensibility.'
• Several book and periodical discussions of bias, particularly discussing variations in the language and treatment of political events by small town newspapers in Pennsylvania.
  

3. Tertiary Reserach. Summative research about research.
   This is the most problematic category of all. Fortunately, you will rarely be expected to differentiate between secondary and tertiary sources.
   
   Some Definitions of Tertiary Sources:

• works which list primary and secondary resources in a specific subject area
• works which index, organize and compile citations to, and show you how to use, secondary (and sometimes primary) sources.
• materials in which the information from secondary sources has been "digested" - reformatted and condensed, to put it into a convenient, easy-to-read form.
• Sources which are once removed in time from secondary sources

Some examples of tertiary sources:
Usually, no single person puts these together. They are work gathered in the aggregate, with a publisher's name or .

• almanacs and fact books
• bibliographies (may also be secondary)
• chronologies
• dictionaries and encyclopedias such as Wikipedia (may also be secondary)
  For example, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is a secondary source—they do their own research—but the Etymological Dictionary is tertiary in that it's author does not do his own research, the work is derivitive.
• directories such as the phone book
• guidebooks, manuals etc.
• handbooks and data compilations (may also be secondary)
• indexing and abstracting tools used to locate primary & secondary sources (may also be secondary)
• textbooks (may also be secondary)

Examples of Primary, Secondary & Tertiary Sources

2002; Last revised July 14, 2008
Dr. Bonnie Duncan
bduncan@millersville.edu
1-717-871-2080
English Department
Millersville University
Millersville, PA 17551

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