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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".
Primary sources may or may not be independent or third-party sources. A scientific paper documenting a new experiment conducted by the author is a primary source on the outcome of that experiment. Secondary sources provide an author's own thinking based on primary sources, generally at least one step removed from an event. It contains an author ...
Sometimes, however, secondary sources act as filters and add "spin" to primary sources. Therefore, polemical or controversial secondary sources should be balanced with other secondary sources, and typically by reference to the unvarnished primary sources, so that the reader can have a basis to determine which secondary source provides the most ...
I see now .The source pages for the first and fifth quotations no longer exist, even in archived form, and the fourth quotation is taken out of context; the source also names "a newscaster's commentary on the day's events" and "Articles from magazines, journals, newsletters, newspapers, etc." as types of secondary sources. [1]
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 primary source, such as a report of a pivotal experiment cited as evidence for a hypothesis, may be a valuable component of an article. A good article may appropriately cite primary, secondary, and tertiary sources. Use of primary sources should always conform to the No original research policy.
The medium is not the message; source evaluation is an evaluation of content, not publication format. Sometimes high-quality, generally tertiary individual sources are also primary or secondary sources for some material. Two examples are etymological research that is the original work of a dictionary's staff (primary); and analytical not just regurgitative material in a topical encycl
The delineation of sources as primary and secondary first arose in the field of historiography, as historians attempted to identify and classify the sources of historical writing. In scholarly writing, an important objective of classifying sources is to determine the independence and reliability of sources. [ 21 ]