Understand the kinds of sources readers expect you to use - Consult primary sources for evidence - Finding useful sources - Part I. Research and writing: from planning to production

A manual for writers of research papers, theses, and dissertations, 7th edition - Kate L. Turabian 2007

Understand the kinds of sources readers expect you to use - Consult primary sources for evidence
Finding useful sources
Part I. Research and writing: from planning to production

Once you have at least a question and perhaps a working hypothesis along with a few tentative reasons for supporting it, you can start looking for the data you'll need to support your reasons and test your hypothesis. In this chapter we explain how to find those data and in the next how to work with them. But don't think of finding sources and reading them as separate steps. Once you have a promising source, read it to find other sources. And as you fill your storyboard with notes, you'll discover gaps and new questions that only more sources can fill. So while we discuss finding and using sources as two steps, you'll more often do them repeatedly and simultaneously.

3.1 Understand the kinds of sources readers expect you to use

Depending on your experience, readers will expect you to use different levels of sources, called primary, secondary, and tertiary (think first-, second-, and thirdhand). These aren't sharply defined categories, but they roughly characterize how researchers think about most sources.

3.1.1 Consult primary sources for evidence

In fields such as literary studies, the arts, and history, primary sources are original works—diaries, letters, manuscripts, images, films, film scripts, recordings, and musical scores created by writers, artists, composers, and so on. Those sources provide data—the words, images, and sounds that you use as evidence to support your reasons. Data can also be objects: coins, clothing, tools, and other artifacts from the period or belonging to a person you're studying.

In fields such as economics, psychology, chemistry, and so on, researchers typically collect data through observation and experiment. In others, researchers gather evidence through interviews. (To conduct effective interviews, you must use reliable methods for eliciting and recording the information you collect.) In such fields, evidence consists of the data that researchers collect. The primary sources for those collected data are the publications that first publish them, ranging from government and commercial databases to scholarly journals.

Experienced researchers look for data in primary sources first. If, for example, you were writing on Alamo stories, you'd try to find sources written at the time—letters, diaries, eyewitness reports, and so on.