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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".
Sources of information are commonly categorized as primary, secondary, or tertiary sources.In brief, a primary source is one close to the event with firsthand knowledge (for example, an eyewitness); a secondary source is at least one step removed (for example, a book about an event written by someone not involved in it); and a tertiary source is an encyclopaedia or textbook that provides a ...
They rely on primary sources for their material, making analytic or evaluative claims about them. [d] For example, a review article that analyzes research papers in a field is a secondary source for the research. [e] Whether a source is primary or secondary depends on context. A book by a military historian about the Second World War might be a ...
Secondary sources may draw on primary sources and other secondary sources to create a general overview; or to make analytic or synthetic claims. [3] [4] Tertiary sources are publications such as encyclopedias or other compendia that sum up secondary and primary sources. For example, Wikipedia itself is a tertiary source.
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 ...
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).
For the purposes of Wikipedia policies and guidelines, primary, secondary and tertiary sources are defined as follows: [1] [2] Primary sources are very close to an event, often accounts written by people who are directly involved, offering an insider's view of an event, a period of history, a work of art, a political decision, and so on.
Normally there's no need to give a direct quote of whatever secondary source used as a basis for a Wikipedia article. When, for a specific reason (often, for instance, a problem of interpretation), a direct quote is needed, the quote quite unavoidably becomes a primary source. For example, there are several biographies of Johann Sebastian Bach ...