View the video on the right for an overview of primary and secondary sources and some good examples. You have probably heard of primary and secondary sources before and hopefully have an idea of some of the differences between them and when it is appropriate to use one or the other. However, when you get deeper into your sources, the difference may not always be so clear. Depending on what you are researching, what kinds of questions you are asking, and what you want to know or discuss, one and the same source may shift from being primary to secondary, or vice versa.
Primary is usually defined as first-hand information, a new observation, insight, or idea, results of original study or thinking, uninterpreted data or information. Examples are newspaper eyewitness accounts, diaries, journal entries, letters from soldiers on the front. Secondary is information that has been interpreted, or analyzed, or re-worked in some way. A rough analogy might be: primary is raw, secondary is cooked.
But is it always so easy to distinguish the raw from the cooked? What exactly is “original thinking” and “uninterpreted information”? For instance, if you are researching religious beliefs and looking at creeds, you will find many Christian denominations base their statements of faith on a unique interpretation of the Bible; does this make the statement of faith secondary? The flood story pre-dates the Bible, many scholars believe it was adapted by the compilers of the Bible; does this make the Bible secondary?
It depends. It depends on the context from which the source originates and it depends on what you want to get from it, what your specific research question is. The official website for the Church of Mormon will give you the tenets of their faith and a history of their church. If your question is simply, “what do Mormons believe?” this would be the primary source. But if you want to do a psychological profile of the founder of the religion, Joseph Smith, the same source may be secondary.
So your research question determines whether a source is primary or secondary.
Whether a source is primary or secondary often depends on how close in time it is to the event upon which you are focusing. Recall from the Information Cycle video that newspapers and popular magazines were considered closer to the event source -- the tragic shootings at Columbine -- because they reported eye-witness accounts and initial reactions to the event. Scholarly journals and books came later and were more secondary because they analyzed and interpreted these reactions and accounts of the events and placed them in a larger context.
But there are other circumstances in which the scholarly journal article would be considered the primary source and the popular magazine or newspaper article would be secondary. This is often the case when the primary “event” is not a newsworthy tragedy or happening in the world, but scholarly or scientific research itself. For instance, this news article reports on the results of a study about the effects of high fructose corn-syrup on weight gain in rats. If you read this article, you will basically get the “bottom line”: the results of the research and its significance to the scientific community or society at large. But you won’t get the details, the facts and figures, the numbers and the data of the study itself. For this, you have to go to the original journal article. This journal article is the primary source here. It is reporting on the research done. The news article is a secondary source, it is further removed from the research “event” and only reporting a basic summary.
Sources:
Parker, H. (2010, March 22). A sweet problem: Princeton researchers find that high-fructose corn syrup prompts considerly more weight gain. News at Princeton. Retreived from http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/
Bocarsly, M. E., Powell, E. S., Avena, N. M., & Hoebel, B. G. (2010). High-fructose corn syrup causes characteristics of obesity in rats: Increased body weight, body fat and triglyceride levels. Pharmocology, Biochemistry, and Behavior, 97(1), 101-6. doi:10.1016/j.pbb.2010.02.012