Read secondary sources to learn from other researchers - 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

Read secondary sources to learn from other researchers
Finding useful sources
Part I. Research and writing: from planning to production

Secondary sources are books and articles that analyze primary sources, usually written by and for other researchers. A report in a scholarly journal analyzing Alamo stories would be a secondary source for researchers working on those stories. Secondary sources also include specialized encyclopedias and dictionaries that offer essays written by scholars in a field. You use secondary sources for three purposes:

1. To Keep Up with Current Research. Researchers read secondary sources to keep up with the work of other researchers, to inform and refine their thinking, and to motivate their own work by adding to a published line of research.

2. To Find Other Points of View. A research report is not complete until the researcher acknowledges and responds to the views of others and to his readers' predictable questions and disagreements (see 5.4.3). You can find most of those other points of view in secondary sources. What alternatives to your ideas do they offer? What evidence do they cite that you must acknowledge? Some new researchers think they weaken their case if they mention any view opposing their own. The truth is the opposite. When you acknowledge competing views, you show readers that you not only know those views but can confidently respond to them (for more on this, see 5.4.3).

More important, you must use those competing views to improve your own. You can't understand what you think until you understand why a rational person might think differently. So as you look for sources, don't look just for those that support your views. Be alert as well for those that contradict them.

3. To Find Models for Your Own Research and Analysis. You can use secondary sources to find out not just what others have written about your topic, but how they have written about it, as models for the form and style of your own report. Imagine a secondary source as a colleague talking to you about your topic. As you respond, you'd want to sound like someone who knows the field, and so you'd try to learn how she reasons, the language she uses, the kinds of evidence she offers, and the kinds she rarely or never uses. The “conversation” would be in writing, so you'd even imitate stylistic details such as whether she writes in long paragraphs or breaks up her pages with subheads and bullet points (common in the social sciences, less common in the humanities).

You can also use a secondary source as a model for your conceptual analysis. If, for example, you were analyzing Alamo stories, you might study how a source treats Custer's Last Stand. Is its approach psychological, social, historical, political? Its particular reasons or evidence will probably be irrelevant to your project, but you might support your answer with the same kinds of data and reasoning, perhaps even following the same organization.

So if you come across a source that's not exactly on your topic but treats one like it, skim it to see how that researcher thinks about his material and presents it. (You don't have to cite that source if you use only its general logic, but you may cite it to give your own approach more authority.)

Researchers use data reported in secondary sources only when they can't find them in primary sources. Then they're cautious about using those secondary sources, because secondhand reports of data have a high error rate. If you're doing very advanced work, check the accuracy of important quotations, facts, or numbers from secondary sources. Those who publish in respected places rarely misreport deliberately, but they make careless mistakes more often than nonexperts think or experts admit.

Of course, if you were studying how the Alamo story has been analyzed, then secondary sources offering those analyses would be your primary sources.

If you're new to a field, you may find secondary sources hard to read: they assume a lot of background knowledge, and many aren't clearly written (see 11.2). If you're working on a topic new to you, you might begin with an overview in a specialized encyclopedia or reliable tertiary source.