Everyone's guide to research and sources

Want information? You do research in order to find it. If you've already handed in your last ever term paper, you haven't graduated from the need to do research. You may never have to do research like a scientist or a lawyer or even a student. But you do research. To make sure you find the best answer for your question, it helps to keep in mind a few things about the sources of information. This post is not about online versus print. It is about the various distances between an information source and the origin of the information it contains.

You may have heard of primary, secondary, and tertiary sources. The primary sources are those closest to whatever you want to study. If you want to study the US Constitution, the Constitution itself is the primary source. If you want to study how it came to be written, primary sources would include the Federalist Papers (which you can find easily), and various pamphlets, letters and private papers written by, well, lots of people at the time. Most primary sources (in history anyway) are difficult to identify and find, and you need to gather lots of them in order to piece together an account of what happened.

Most people who want to learn about the Constitution don't want to know badly enough to find and sift through all those primary sources. Fortunately, the people who do want to know that badly usually wind up writing books or journal articles that the rest of us can read. These books and articles are called secondary sources and are a step removed from the actual documentation of creating and ratifying the Constitution.

Suppose, however, you don't want to study the development of the Constitution. You just want a brief overview to satisfy your curiosity about something, or you simply want to remind yourself of certain facts or details. You might look in an encyclopedia. If it's a good encyclopedia, the article is probably by someone who wrote some of the secondary sources. But that person did not go back through all of that to produce the article. All it takes to write an encyclopedia article is comparison of enough secondary sources to assure consideration of more than one viewpoint. It is a tertiary source. So are the articles in most magazines.

If you want information about a scientific question, a legal question, or basically anything else, you still have these three levels of sources. Scientific primary sources probably include all of the various experiments and observations made by teams of scientists, but we might as well include the summaries of their research that they write for professional journals.  Legal primary sources include laws, regulations, court decisions, transcripts of various hearings, etc.

Secondary sources would include the kinds of books and articles  comparable to historical secondary sources. A secondary source might be written for specialists and use  highly technical language, or it might be written for the general public using minimal technical language. Tertiary sources again include articles in magazines and encyclopedias.

Any time you want to look up information, whether for some serious purpose or simply to satisfy curiosity or just relax with interesting reading material, consider what you need. The easiest sources to find  may not be the most  helpful. If you need to look further, clarity about what you actually need will help you find the most appropriate sources the most quickly.