Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
A secondary source contrasts with a primary, or original, source of the information being discussed. A primary source can be a person with direct knowledge of a situation or it may be a document created by such a person. A secondary source is one that gives information about a primary source.
Secondary data refers to data that is collected by someone other than the primary user. [1] Common sources of secondary data for social science include censuses, information collected by government departments, organizational records and data that was originally collected for other research purposes. [2]
So while a dictionary is an example of a tertiary source, an ancient dictionary is actually a primary source—for the meanings of words in the ancient world. There are no quaternary sources: Either the source is primary, or it describes, comments on, or analyzes primary sources (in which case, it is secondary), or it relies heavily or entirely ...
Secondary sources are accounts at least one step removed from an event or body of primary-source material and may include an interpretation, analysis, or synthetic claims about the subject. [2] 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]
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
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).
It has a policy distinguishing among primary, secondary, and tertiary sources. Dictionaries and glossaries present a special challenge in determining whether the source is primary, secondary, or tertiary. One dictionary or glossary may be considered a primary source among linguists, whereas for Wikipedia's purposes it is a secondary source.
They have been distinguished from secondary sources, which often cite, comment on, or build upon primary sources. [6] They serve as an original source of information or new ideas about the topic. Primary and secondary, however, are relative terms, and any given source may be classified as primary or secondary, depending on how it is used. [7]