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In genealogical research, information can be obtained from primary or secondary sources. Primary sources are records that were made at the time of the event, for example a death certificate would be a primary source for a person's death date and place. Secondary sources are records that are made days, weeks, months, or even years after an event.
Scipione Amati's History of the Kingdom of Woxu (1615), an example of a secondary source. In scholarship, a secondary source [1] [2] is a document or recording that relates or discusses information originally presented elsewhere. A secondary source contrasts with a primary, or original, source of the information being discussed. A primary ...
A primary source can have all of these qualities, and a secondary source may have none of them. Deciding whether primary, secondary or tertiary sources are appropriate on any given occasion is a matter of good editorial judgment and common sense, not merely mindless, knee-jerk reactions to classification of a source as "primary" or "secondary".
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Many sources contain a combination of primary/secondary or secondary/tertiary material, sometimes all three. A source that is secondary in one context may be primary in another (e.g. a history book is a secondary source for the facts it reports, but a primary source for what the author wrote about an event).
A tertiary source is an index or textual consolidation of already published primary and secondary sources [6] that does not provide additional interpretations or analysis of the sources. [7] [8] Some tertiary sources can be used as an aid to find key (seminal) sources, key terms, general common knowledge [9] and established mainstream science on a
Examples in which a source can be both primary and secondary include an obituary [23] or a survey of several volumes of a journal counting the frequency of articles on a certain topic. [23] Whether a source is regarded as primary or secondary in a given context may change, depending upon the present state of knowledge within the field. [24]
Reputable secondary sources, such as authoritative textbooks and review articles, are generally preferred over primary sources in Wikipedia—primary sources often require specialists to interpret them correctly and place them in the proper context, and it is especially difficult to avoid original research when relying mostly on primary sources.
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