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• Primary Sources
• Definitions
• Documents - Printed & Published
• Objects and Artifacts
• Sound Recordings
• Visual Materials
• Digitized Sources
• Locating Sources
• Sources By Subject
• Evaluating Sources
• Documenting Sources / Copyright
• Research Tips
• Using Archives This link opens in a new window

Primary Sources Definition

What are primary sources .

Primary sources enable the researcher to get as close as possible to the truth of what actually happened during an historical event or time period. Primary source is a term used in a number of disciplines to describe source material that is closest to the person, information, period, or idea being studied.  A primary source (also called original source ) is a document, recording, artifact, or other source of information that was created at the time under study, usually by a source with direct personal knowledge of the events being described. It serves as an original source of information about the topic.

Similar definitions are used in library science , and other areas of scholarship. In journalism, a primary source can be a person with direct knowledge of a situation, or a document created by such a person. Primary sources are distinguished from secondary sources , which cite, comment on, or build upon primary sources, though the distinction is not a sharp one.

Newspaper Research

• Historical Newspapers (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window Includes the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, Christian Science Monitor, and more. Newspapers are in PDF format and provide a visual representation of the newspaper.
• ProQuest Central This link opens in a new window Includes both newspapers and scholarly journals
• Historical Newspapers The Guardian and The Observer Search The Guardian (1821-2003) and its sister paper, The Observer (1791-2003)
• New York Newspaper Archive This link opens in a new window Access New York Newspaper Archives and discover stories of the past with NewspaperArchive.com. The archive covers New York history from 1753-2023, with lots of content from smaller, local newspapers. Articles have been scanned as PDFs and include images and advertisements, and are full text searchable.
• America's Historical Newspapers This link opens in a new window America's Historical Newspapers includes articles from local and regional American and Hispanic American newspapers from all 50 states. Coverage dates from 1690 to the early 20th century. Articles have been scanned as PDFs and include images and advertisements, and are full text searchable.
• American Periodicals Series Online This link opens in a new window includes digitized images of the pages of American magazines and journals published from colonial days to the dawn of the 20th century, 1740-1940.
• Times Digital Archive (London) This link opens in a new window Provides full-text access to back issues of The Times newspaper. Dates of coverage: 1785 to 2006.
• Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808-1980 This link opens in a new window Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808-1980 provides access to searchable digitized copies of newspapers printed in the U.S. during the 19th and 20th centuries for a Hispanic readership. It features hundreds of monolingual and bilingual newspapers in Spanish and English, including many obscure titles from the 19th century.
• Global Newsstream This link opens in a new window Full text of 300+ U.S. and international news sources. Includes coverage of 150+ major U.S. and international newspapers such as The New York Times and the Times of London, plus hundreds of other news sources and news wires.
• Gale Newspaper Sources This link opens in a new window The Gale NewsVault is a portal to several historical collections of British newspapers and periodicals. It enables full-text searching across several titles simultaneously, including the Times of London, Financial Times, and Times Literary Supplement, along with aggregate newspaper and periodical collections covering the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.
• Access World News This link opens in a new window Access World News provides the html full text and, for some titles, the pdf "as printed" visual representation, of articles from a variety of national and international news sources, including newspapers, digital-native news websites, television and radio transcripts, blogs, college and university newspapers, journals, magazines, and some audio and video. Most international titles are English language. Dates of coverage vary from title to title, but primarily span the late 20th century to present.

The Billy Rose Theatre Collection

TITLE: [Scene from Othello with Paul Robeson as Othello and Uta Hagen as Desdemona, Theatre Guild Production, Broadway, 1943-44]   http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Robeson_Hagen_Othello.jpg SOURCE:Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540

The Billy Rose Theatre Collection of The New York Public Library is one of the largest and most comprehensive archives devoted to the theatrical arts. This image is a work of an employee of the United States Farm Security Administration or Office of War Information domestic photographic units, created during the course of the person's official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image is in the public domain.

• Billy Rose Collection NYPL The Billy Rose Theatre Division of The New York Public Library is one of the largest and most comprehensive archives devoted to the theatrical arts.
• New York Public Library Archives & Manuscripts On this site, you can search The New York Public Library's vast holdings, initiate a research visit, submit a query to an archivist, and access digitized material. Most Broadway shows can be viewed in the special collections. You will need a NYPL library card to view them.
• ArchiveGrid This link opens in a new window Thousands of libraries, museums, and archives have contributed nearly a million collection descriptions to ArchiveGrid.
• WorldCat - FirstSearch (OCLC) This link opens in a new window Search for books and more in libraries in the U.S. and around the world. Indicates when NYU Libraries holds a copy of a book and shows you nearby libraries with holdings.
• Internet Archive Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library offering free universal access to books, movies & music, as well as 456 billion archived web pages.
• Archives Unbound This link opens in a new window NYU is currently subscribing 14 collections:African America, Communists, and the National Negro Congress; Federal Response to Radicalism; Federal Surveillance of African Americans; Feminism in Cuba - 19th through 20th century archival document; Global Missions and Theology; India from Crown Rule to Republic; Testaments to the Holocaust (Documents and Rare Printed Materials from the Wiener Library, London); The Hindu Conspiracy Cases (Activities of the Indian Independence Movement in the U.S., 1908-1933); The Indian Army and Colonial Warfare on the Frontiers of India; The International Women’s Movement (The Pan Pacific Southeast Asia Women’s Association of the USA, 1950-1985); The Middle East Online - Arab-Israeli Relations; The Middle East Online - Iraq; U.S. and Iraqi Relations: U.S. Technical Aid; and, Witchcraft in Europe.

Historical Databases

An advert for P.T. Barnum's "Feejee Mermaid" in 1842 or thereabout. Author: P. T. Barnum or an employee, Source: Newspaper advert commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/File:Barnum_mermai... This image (or other media file) is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.

• America: History and Life with Full Text This link opens in a new window ndexes literature covering the history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present. The database indexes 1,700 journals and also includes citations and links to book and media reviews. Strong English-language journal coverage is balanced by an international perspective on topics and events, including abstracts in English of articles published in more than 40 languages. Publication dates of coverage: 1964 to present.
• Historical Abstracts with Full Text (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window Covers the history of the world (excluding the United States and Canada) from 1450 to the present, including world history, military history, women's history, history of education, and more. Indexes more than 1,700 academic historical journals in over 40 languages. Publication dates of coverage: 1955 to present.
• Theatre in Context Collection This link opens in a new window O’Dell’s Annals of the New York Stage, the Oxford University Press Companion series, and Greenwood’s American Theatre Companies series are just a few of the many in-copyright sources included in the Theatre in Context Collection. Placed alongside thousands of playbills, posters, photographs, and related theatrical ephemera, users will be able to paint a more comprehensive picture of the life and evolution of dramatic works.
• Black Thought and Culture This link opens in a new window Contains 1297 sources with 1100 authors, covering the non-fiction published works of leading African-Americans. Particular care has been taken to index this material so that it can be searched more thoroughly than ever before. Where possible the complete published non-fiction works are included, as well as interviews, journal articles, speeches, essays, pamphlets, letters and other fugitive material.
• Periodicals Archive Online This link opens in a new window Provides full-text and full-image access to hundreds of journals published in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and areas of general popular interest. Each periodical is covered back to its first issue, regardless of when it began publication. International in scope, PAO covers periodicals in a number of Western languages.
• Accessible Archives This link opens in a new window Includes the following collections: African American Newspapers, The Civil War Part I. A Newspaper Perspective, The Pennsylvania Genealogical Catalog, Pennsylvania Newspaper Record, South Carolina Newspapers, and The Liberator. ** Within these collections are papers such as The Charleston Mercury, The Christian Recorder, The Colored American, Douglass Monthly, Frederick, Douglass Paper, Freedom's Journal, Godey's Lady's Book, The Liberator, The National Era, The New York Herald, The North Star, The Pennsylvania Gazette, The Pennsylvania Packet, The Maryland Gazette, Provincial Freeman, Richmond Enquirer, The South Carolina Gazette, The Gazette of the State of South Carolina, The South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, The South Carolina and American General Gazette, Weekly Advocate.
• Early English Books Online (EEBO) This link opens in a new window Early English Books Online (EEBO) contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700. Searchable full text is also available for a subset of the collection.
• Eighteenth Century Journals This link opens in a new window Eighteenth Century Journals brings together rare journals printed between 1685 and 1835, primarily in the British Isles (with some publications from India, the Caribbean, and Europe). Users can view and download page images and search transcribed full text for all journals in the collection.
• C19: The 19th Century Index This link opens in a new window C19: The 19th Century Index provides bibliographic coverage of nineteenth-century books, periodicals, official documents, newspapers and archives from the English-speaking world. This database includes the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals (1824-1900), Poole's Index to Periodical Literature, Palmer's Index to The Times, the Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, and more.
• Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives 1960 - 1974 This link opens in a new window This resource consists of diaries, letters, autobiographies and other memoirs, written and oral histories, manifestos, government documents, memorabilia, and scholarly commentary. With 150,000 pages of material at completion, this searchable collection is a resource for students and scholars researching this period in American history, culture, and politics.
• African American Archives (via Fold3) This link opens in a new window This full text resource offers access to original documents that reveal a side of the African American story that few have seen before.
• African American Experience This link opens in a new window Full-text digital resource exploring the history and culture of African Americans, as well as the greater Black Diaspora. Features access to full-text content from more than 400 titles, 3,000 slave narratives, over 2000 images, 5,000 primary sources, and 250 vetted Web sites.

Letters & Diaries /Oral Histories

• Oral History Online This link opens in a new window Provides in-depth indexing to more than 2,700 collections of Oral History in English from around the world. The collection provides keyword searching of almost 281,000 pages of full-text by close to 10,000 individuals from all walks of life.
• American Civil War: Letters and Diaries This link opens in a new window This database contains 2,009 authors and approximately 100,000 pages of diaries, letters and memoirs. Includes 4,000 pages of previously unpublished manuscripts such as the letters of Amos Wood and his wife and the diary of Maryland Planter William Claytor. The collection also includes biographies, an extensive bibliography of the sources in the database, and material licensed from The Civil War Day-by-Day by E.B. Long.
• British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries This link opens in a new window Includes 10,000 pages of diaries and letters revealing the experiences of approximately 500 women. The collection now includes primary materials spanning more than 300 years. The collection also includes biographies and an extensive annotated bibliography of the sources in the database.
• North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories This link opens in a new window North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories includes 2,162 authors and approximately 100,000 pages of information, so providing a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950. Contains contemporaneous letters, diaries, oral histories, interviews, and other personal narratives.
• North American Women's Letters and Diaries This link opens in a new window North American Women's Letters and Diaries includes the immediate experiences of 1,325 women and 150,000 pages of diaries and letters.

Gale Primary Sources

• Gale Primary Sources This link opens in a new window Gale Artemis is a groundbreaking research environment that integrates formerly disparate digital collections to enable innovative research. Gale Artemis provides an unprecedented, seamless research experience that helps students find a starting point, search across a wide array of materials and points in time, and discover new ways to analyze information.

Victorian Popular Culture

• Victorian Popular Culture This link opens in a new window An essential resource for the study of popular entertainment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This innovative portal invites users into the darkened halls, small backrooms and travelling venues that hosted everything from spectacular shows and bawdy burlesque, to the world of magic and spiritualist séances. ** The resource is divided into four self-contained sections: Moving Pictures, Optical Entertainments and the Advent of Cinema; Music Hall, Theatre and Popular Entertainment; Circuses, Sideshows and Freaks; Spiritualism, Sensation and Magic

Historical Image Collections

commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/File:Cushman_in_Ha... , The American actress Charlotte Cushman advertised in William Shakespeare's Hamlet at the Washington Theater in 1861.  Author:Washington Theater, SOURCE:Public Library of Congress. this image (or other media file) is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.

• American Broadsides and Ephemera This link opens in a new window American Broadsides and Ephemera offers fully searchable images of approximately 15,000 broadsides printed between 1820 and 1900 and 15,000 pieces of ephemera printed between 1760 and 1900. The remarkably diverse subjects of these broadsides range from contemporary accounts of the Civil War, unusual occurrences and natural disasters to official government proclamations, tax bills and town meeting reports. Featuring many rare items, the pieces of ephemera include clipper ship sailing cards, early trade cards, bill heads, theater and music programs, stock certificates, menus and invitations documenting civic, political and private celebrations.
• Early American Imprints, Series I. Evans, 1639-1800 This link opens in a new window Search or browse the books, pamphlets, broadsides and other imprints listed in the renowned bibliography by Charles Evans.
• Early American Imprints, Series II. Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819 This link opens in a new window Search or browse the books, pamphlets, broadsides and other imprints listed in the distinguished bibliography by Ralph R. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker. 1801-1819
• American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collection (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window Provide digital access to the most comprehensive collection of American periodicals published between 1691 and 1877. Included digitized images of American magazines and journals never before available outside the walls of the American Antiquarian Society. The collection is available in five series: Series 1 (1691-1820) - Series 2 (1821-1837) - Series 3 (1838-1852) - Series 4 (1853-1865) - Series 5 (1866-1877)

Link to Bobst Special Collections

• NYU Special Collections Bobst Library's Special Collections department houses significant archival resources including materials from the Downtown Collection, which documents New York City's downtown arts scene from the 1970s through the early 1990s. Maria Irene Fornés and Richard Foreman are among the many artists whose materials are housed in the Downtown Collection.
• Fales It is especially strong in English literature from the middle of the 18th century to the present, documenting developments in the novel. The Downtown Collection documents the downtown New York art, performance, and literary scenes from 1975 to the present and is extremely rich in archival holdings, including extensive film and video objects.
• Tamiment One of the finest research collections in the country documenting the history of radical politics: socialism, communism, anarchism, utopian experiments, the cultural left, the New Left, and the struggle for civil rights and civil liberties.

Guide to International Collections

• SIBMAS International Directory of Performing Arts Collections and Institutions

Books Containing Primary Source Documents

• The mediaeval stage by Chambers, E. K. (Edmund Kerchever), 1866-1954 Call Number: Online versions avail.
• The Elizabethan stage by Chambers, E. K. (Edmund Kerchever), 1866-1954 Call Number: PN2589 .C4 1965 4 vol. plus online version avail
• The diary of Samuel Pepys by Pepys, Samuel, 1633-1703 Call Number: Avail. online
• A history of theatrical art in ancient and modern times. by Mantzius, Karl, 1860-1921 Call Number: PN2106 .M313 1970 4 vol. also internet access
• Ben Jonson by Ben Jonson Call Number: online access
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What Is a Primary Source?

Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms - Definition and Examples

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• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

In research and academics, a primary source refers to information collected from sources that witnessed or experienced an event firsthand. These can be historical documents , literary texts, artistic works, experiments, journal entries, surveys, and interviews. A primary source, which is very different from a secondary source , is also called primary data.

The Library of Congress defines primary sources as "the raw materials of history—original documents and objects which were created at the time under study," in contrast to secondary sources , which are "accounts or interpretations of events created by someone without firsthand experience," ("Using Primary Sources").

Secondary sources are often meant to describe or analyze a primary source and do not give firsthand accounts; primary sources tend to provide more accurate depictions of history but are much harder to come by.

Characteristics of Primary Sources

There are a couple of factors that can qualify an artifact as a primary source. The chief characteristics of a primary source, according to Natalie Sproull, are: "(1) [B]eing present during the experience, event or time and (2) consequently being close in time with the data. This does not mean that data from primary sources are always the best data."

Sproull then goes on to remind readers that primary sources are not always more reliable than secondary sources. "Data from human sources are subject to many types of distortion because of such factors as selective recall, selective perceptions, and purposeful or nonpurposeful omission or addition of information. Thus data from primary sources are not necessarily accurate data even though they come from firsthand sources," (Sproull 1988).

Original Sources

Primary sources are often called original sources, but this is not the most accurate description because you're not always going to be dealing with original copies of primary artifacts. For this reason, "primary sources" and "original sources" should be considered separate. Here's what the authors of "Undertaking Historical Research in Literacy," from Handbook of Reading Research , have to say about this:

"The distinction also needs to be made between primary and original sources . It is by no means always necessary, and all too often it is not possible, to deal only with original sources. Printed copies of original sources, provided they have been undertaken with scrupulous care (such as the published letters of the Founding Fathers), are usually an acceptable substitute for their handwritten originals." (E. J. Monaghan and D. K. Hartman, "Undertaking Historical Research in Literacy," in Handbook of Reading Research , ed. by P. D. Pearson et al. Erlbaum, 2000)

When to Use Primary Sources

Primary sources tend to be most useful toward the beginning of your research into a topic and at the end of a claim as evidence, as Wayne Booth et al. explain in the following passage. "[Primary sources] provide the 'raw data' that you use first to test the working hypothesis and then as evidence to support your claim . In history, for example, primary sources include documents from the period or person you are studying, objects, maps, even clothing; in literature or philosophy, your main primary source is usually the text you are studying, and your data are the words on the page. In such fields, you can rarely write a research paper  without using primary sources," (Booth et al. 2008).

When to Use Secondary Sources

There is certainly a time and place for secondary sources and many situations in which these point to relevant primary sources. Secondary sources are an excellent place to start. Alison Hoagland and Gray Fitzsimmons write: "By identifying basic facts, such as year of construction, secondary sources can point the researcher to the best primary sources , such as the right tax books. In addition, a careful reading of the bibliography in a secondary source can reveal important sources the researcher might otherwise have missed," (Hoagland and Fitzsimmons 2004).

Finding and Accessing Primary Sources

As you might expect, primary sources can prove difficult to find. To find the best ones, take advantage of resources such as libraries and historical societies. "This one is entirely dependent on the assignment given and your local resources; but when included, always emphasize quality. ... Keep in mind that there are many institutions such as the Library of Congress that make primary source material freely available on the Web," (Kitchens 2012).

Methods of Collecting Primary Data

Sometimes in your research, you'll run into the problem of not being able to track down primary sources at all. When this happens, you'll want to know how to collect your own primary data; Dan O'Hair et all tell you how: "If the information you need is unavailable or hasn't yet been gathered, you'll have to gather it yourself. Four basic methods of collecting primary data are field research, content analysis, survey research, and experiments. Other methods of gathering primary data include historical research, analysis of existing statistics, ... and various forms of direct observation," (O'Hair et al. 2001).

• Booth, Wayne C., et al. The Craft of Research . 3rd ed., University of Chicago Press, 2008.
• Hoagland, Alison, and Gray Fitzsimmons. "History."  Recording Historic Structures. 2nd. ed., John Wiley & Sons, 2004.
• Kitchens, Joel D. Librarians, Historians, and New Opportunities for Discourse: A Guide for Clio's Helpers . ABC-CLIO, 2012.
• Monaghan, E. Jennifer, and Douglas K. Hartman. "Undertaking Historical Research in Literacy." Handbook of Reading Research. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002.
• O'Hair, Dan, et al. Business Communication: A Framework for Success . South-Western College Pub., 2001.
• Sproull, Natalie L. Handbook of Research Methods: A Guide for Practitioners and Students in the Social Sciences. 2nd ed. Scarecrow Press, 1988.
• "Using Primary Sources." Library of Congress .
• Secondary Sources in Research
• Primary and Secondary Sources in History
• How to Prove Your Family Tree Connections
• Research in Essays and Reports
• Five Steps to Verifying Online Genealogy Sources
• Pros and Cons of Secondary Data Analysis
• Understanding Secondary Data and How to Use It in Research
• Documentation in Reports and Research Papers
• What Is a Research Paper?
• 6 Skills Students Need to Succeed in Social Studies Classes
• How to Use Libraries and Archives for Research
• How to Cite Genealogy Sources
• Glossary of Historical Terms
• Definition and Examples of Quotation in English Grammar
• How to Determine a Reliable Source on the Internet
• Fashion Throughout History

• Harvard Library
• Research Guides
• Faculty of Arts & Sciences Libraries

Library Research Guide for the History of Science: Introduction

• What is a Primary Source?
• Senior Theses 2023
• Background and Context/Biography
• Exploring Your Topic
• Using HOLLIS
• What is a Secondary Source?

Page Contents

Knowing a primary source when you see one, kinds of primary sources, find primary sources in hollis, using digital libraries and collections online, using bibliographies.

• Exploring the Special Collections at Harvard
• Citing Sources & Organizing Research

Primary sources provide first-hand testimony or direct evidence concerning a topic under investigation. They are created by witnesses or recorders who experienced the events or conditions being documented.

Often these sources are created at the time when the events or conditions are occurring, but primary sources can also include autobiographies, memoirs, and oral histories recorded later.

Primary sources are characterized by their content, regardless of the format available. (Handwritten notes could be published; the published book might be digitized or put on microfilm, but those notes are still primary sources in any format).

Some types of primary sources:

• Original documents (excerpts or translations acceptable): Diaries, speeches, manuscripts, letters, interviews, news film footage, contemporary newspaper articles, autobiographies, official records, pamphlets, meeting notes, photographs, contemporary sketches
• Creative works : Poetry, drama, novels, music, art 
• Relics or artifacts : Furniture, clothing, buildings

Examples of primary sources include:

• A poster from the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters' 1962 strike
• The papers of William James
• A 1970 U.S. State Dept document updating Nixon on U.S.-Soviet space cooperation activities (Harvard login)
• A British pamphlet: "Electric Lighting for Country Houses," 1898
• Phineas Gage's skull
• The text of J. Robert Oppenheimer's "Atomic Weapons" presentation to the American Philosophical Society

Outline of Primary Sources for History

Archives and Manuscripts

Archives and manuscripts are the unpublished records of persons (letters, notes, diaries, etc.) and organizations. What are Archives?   Usually each archival collection has a (short) catalog record and a detailed finding aid (which is often available online).

• "Catalog record” refers to the kind of record found in library online catalogs, similar to those for books, although often a bit longer. Example of an Archive record .
• “Finding aid” (sometimes called an inventory) generally refers to a list of the folder labels for the collection, accompanied by a brief collection overview (scope and contents note) and a biographical (or institutional) note on the creator of the collection.  Finding aids may be as long as needed given the size of the collection.  They vary considerably according to the practices of individual repositories. Example of a Finding aid .

To find  Archives and manuscripts  at Harvard, go to  HOLLIS Advanced search .  Search your keywords or Subject terms (see the  HOLLIS page of this guide ) in the Library Catalog, limiting to Resource Type: Archives/Manuscripts.  You can choose the library at the right (Search Scope).  Countway  Medicine has abundant medical archives, and Schlesinger has many archives of women activists, many in health and reproductive rights fields.    Sample search on Subject: Women health .

Library Research Guide for Finding Manuscripts and Archival Collections explains

• How to find archives and manuscripts at Harvard
• How to find archives and manuscripts elsewhere in US via search tools and via subject guides .
• How to find archives and manuscripts in Europe and elsewhere.
• Requesting digitization of archival material from Harvard and from other repositories .

For digitized archival material together with other kinds of primary sources:

• Finding Primary Sources Online offers general instructions for finding primary sources online and a list of resources by region and country
• Online Primary Source Collections for the History of Science lists digital collections at Harvard and beyond by topic.
• Online Primary Source Collections for History lists digital collections at Harvard and beyond by topic.

Methods for finding books are described under the HOLLIS page  of this guide and in the Finding Primary Sources in HOLLIS box on this page. 

• Book Reviews may give an indication as to how a scientific work was received. See:   Finding Book Reviews . 
• Numerous, especially pre-1923 books (as well as periodicals and other sources) can be found and full text searched in several digital libraries (see box on this page).

Periodicals

Scientific articles :

Web of Science Citation Indexes (Harvard Login)  (1900- ) articles in all areas of science. Includes medical articles not in PubMed. You can use the Cited Reference search in the Web of Science to find primary source articles that cite a specified article, thus getting an idea of its reception. More information on the Web of Science .

PubMed (1946- ) covers, usually with abstracts, periodical articles on all areas of medicine. - --Be sure to look at the MeSH (Medical Subject Headings)  at the bottom of pertinent records. Very recent articles may not as yet received their MeSH terms.  So look at older records to find the MeSH terms, and use a variety of keywords as well as MeSH terms to find the new records. --​The MeSH terms are the same as the Medical Subject terms found in HOLLIS. --Hit Free article or Try Harvard Library, not the publisher's name to see full text

JSTOR (Harvard Login)  offers full-text of complete runs (up to about 5 years ago) of over 400 journals. JSTOR allows simultaneous or individual searching, full-text searching optional, numerous journals in a variety of fields of science and medicine. See the list at the bottom of the Advanced search screen. JSTOR searches the "Notes and News" sections of journals ( Science is especially rich in this material). In Advanced Search choose Item Type: Miscellaneous to limit largely to "Notes and News".

PsycINFO) (Harvard Login)  (1872- ) indexes the professional and academic literature in psychology and related disciplines

Many more scientific periodical indexes are listed in the Library Research Guide for the History of Science .

General interest magazines and periodicals see:

American Periodicals Series Online (Harvard Login)  (1740-1900) offers full text of about 1100 American periodicals. Includes several scientific and medical journals including the American Journal of Science and the Medical Repository. In cases where a periodical started before 1900, coverage is included until 1940.

British Periodicals (Harvard Login)  (1681-1920) offers full text for several hundred British periodicals.

Ethnic NewsWatch (Harvard Login)  (1959- ) is a full text database of the newspapers, magazines, and journals of the ethnic, minority and native press.

Periodicals Index Online (Harvard Login)  indexes contents of thousands of US and European journals in the humanities and social sciences, from their first issues to 1995.

Reader's Guide Retrospective (WilsonWeb) (Harvard Login)  (1890-1982)  indexes many American popular periodicals.

Many more general periodical indexes are listed in Finding Articles in General and Popular Periodicals (North America and Western Europe) .

Articles in non-science fields (religion, public policy): see the list in the Library Research Guide for History .

Professional/Trade : Aimed at particular trades or professions.  See the Library Research Guide for History

Newspaper articles : see the Guide to Newspapers and Newspaper Indexes .

Personal accounts . These are first person narratives recalling or describing a person’s life and opinions. These include Diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, and when delivered orally and recorded: Oral histories and Interviews.

National Library of Medicine Oral Histories

Regulatory Oral History Hub  (Kenan Institute for Ethics, Duke University) offers links to digital collections containing interviews with regulators, lawyers, and judges. Mainly U.S.

Visual sources :

Records for many, but by no means all, individual Harvard University Library images are available in  HOLLIS Images , an online catalog of images. Records include subjects and a thumbnail image.  HOLLIS Images is included in HOLLIS  searches.

Science & Society Picture Library offers over 50,000 images from the Science Museum (London), the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television and the National Railway Museum.

Database of Scientific Illustrators  (DSI) includes over 12500 illustrators in natural history, medicine, technology and various sciences worldwide, c.1450-1950. Living illustrators excluded. 

NYPL Digital Gallery Pictures of Science: 700 Years of Scientific and Medical Illustration

Images from the History of Medicine (IHM) includes prints and photographs from the U.S. National Library of Medicine. (The IHM is contained within a larger NLM image database, so this link goes to a specialized search).

Images From the History of the Public Health Service: a Photographic Exhibit .

Wellcome Images

Films/Videos

To find films in  HOLLIS , search your topic keywords, then on the right side of the results screen, look at Resource Type and choose video/film.

To find books about films about your topic, search your topic keywords AND "in motion pictures" ​  (in "")

​Film Platform  offers numerous documentary films on a wide variety of subjects.  There are collections on several topics. Searches can be filtered by topic, country of production, and language. 

A list of general sources for images and film is available in the Library Research Guide for History and additional sources for the history of science in Library Research Guide for the History of Science .

Government documents often concern matters of science and health policy.  For Congressional documents, especially committee reports, see ProQuest Congressional (Harvard Login ). 

HathiTrust Digital Library . Each full text item is linked to a standard library catalog record, thus providing good metadata and subject terms. The catalog can be searched separately.  Many government documents are full text viewable.  Search US government department as Author.

More sources are listed in the Library Research Guide for History

For artifacts and other objects , the Historic Scientific Instruments Collection in the Science Center includes over 15,000 instruments, often with contemporary documentation, from 1450 through the 20th century worldwide.

Waywiser, online database of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments .

Warren Anatomical Museum of the Center for the History of Medicine in the Countway Library of Medicine has a rich collection of medical artifacts and specimens.

Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology

Fall 2020: these collections are closed during the pandemic. Check out their links above to see what they have available online.

Primary Source Terms :

You can limit HOLLIS  searches to your time period, but sources may be published later, such as a person's diary published posthumously. Find these with these special Subject terms.

You can use the following terms to search HOLLIS for primary sources:

• Correspondence
• Description and travel
• Manuscripts
• Notebooks, sketchbooks, etc.
• Personal narratives (refers to accounts of wars and diseases only)
• Pictorial works
• Sources (usually refers to collections of published primary sources)

Include these terms with your topical words in HOLLIS searches. For example: tuberculosis personal narratives

Online Primary Source Collections for the History of Science lists digital collections at Harvard and beyond by topic

Google Book Search, HathiTrust Digital Library and Internet Archives offer books and periodicals digitized from numerous libraries.  Only out-of-copyright, generally post-1923, books are fully viewable.  Each of these three digital libraries allows searching full text over their entire collections.

Google Book Search

HathiTrust Digital Library . Each full text item is linked to a standard library catalog record, thus providing good metadata and subject terms. The catalog can be searched separately.  Many post-1923 out-of-copyright books, especially government documents, are full text viewable. You can search within copyright books to see what page your search term is on.

Internet Archive now offers a beta full text search. Put your terms (phrases or personal names, in quotation marks (""), work best) in the search box. 

The Online Books Page arranges electronic texts by Library of Congress call numbers and is searchable (but not full text searchable).  Includes books not in Google Books, HathiTrust, or Internet Archive. Has many other useful features.

Medical Heritage Library . Information about the Medical Heritage Library. Now searchable full text.

UK Medical Heritage Library

Biodiversity Heritage Library

Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics (1493-1922) provides digitized historical, manuscript, and image resources selected from Harvard University libraries and archives.

Expeditions and Discoveries (1626-1953) features nine expeditions in anthropology and archaeology, astronomy, botany, and oceanography in which Harvard University played a significant role. Includes manuscripts and records, published materials, visual works, and maps from 14 Harvard repositories.

Defining Gender Online: Five Centuries of Advice Literature for Men and Women (1450-1910).

Twentieth Century Advice Literature: North American Guides on Race, Sex, Gender, and the Family.

Many more general History digital libraries and collections: Library Research Guide for History

More History of Science digital libraries: Library Research Guide for the History of Science .

There may already be a detailed list of sources (a bibliography) for your topic.

For instance:

A bibliography of eugenics , by Samuel J. Holmes ... Berkeley, Calif., University of California press, 1924, 514 p. ( University of California publications in zoology . vol. XXV)  Full text online .

Look for specialized subject bibliographies in HOLLIS Catalog . Example .   WorldCat can do similar searches in the Subject Keyword field for non-Harvard holdings.

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Primary Sources: Definition & Examples

• Definition & Examples
• Finding Primary Sources
• World History
• Politics & Government
• Arts & Theatre

Primary Sources in the Library Collection

Watch Veteran Interviews

Clip from video interview with World War II Veteran Forrest Gore. ( Download Video )

Primary Resources

A primary source is an original object or document -- the raw material or first-hand information, source material that is closest to what is being studied.

Primary sources vary by discipline and can include historical and legal documents, eye witness accounts, results of an experiment, statistical data, pieces of creative writing, and art objects. In the natural and social sciences, the results of an experiment or study are typically found in scholarly articles or papers delivered at conferences, so those articles and papers that present the original results are considered primary sources.

A  secondary source  is something written about a primary source. Secondary sources include comments on, interpretations of, or discussions about the original material.  Secondary source materials can be articles in newspapers or popular magazines, book or movie reviews, or articles found in scholarly journals that evaluate or criticize someone else's original research.

A  tertiary source  is a distillation and collection of primary and secondary sources.

From http://www.lib.umd.edu/guides/primary-sources.html

Primary vs. Secondary

This video tutorial from the Hartness Library on You Tube offers some good illustrations of the difference between primary and secondary sources.  It also includes an overview of how primary and secondary sources can vary based on a research topic.

Subject Guide

Ask The InfoHub

To view chat hours, submit an e-mail question, or view other contact options, please visit the Ask the InfoHub webpage .

Citing Sources

• How to Cite Your Sources Information of citing your sources for papers in MLA, APA, Chicago, and other styles
• Citation Managers This link opens in a new window Citation managers allow you to import references from online databases, organize your references into folders, and generate formatted references pages in a variety of formats (MLA and APA).

Research Appointment

Are your searches not yielding the results you expected? Are you having trouble finding the information you need? You may schedule a private consultation with a librarian to obtain assistance with developing strategies for your research.

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Information For Students

I have to write a research paper using primary sources. where do i start.

• What is the difference between Primary and Secondary sources?
• How do I cite primary source materials?
• What are Special Collections and Archives?
• Student Organizations

Primary sources are created by individuals who participated in or witnessed an event and recorded that event during or immediately after the event.

Explanation:

A student activist during the war writing about protest activities has created a memoir. This would be a primary source because the information is based on her own involvement in the events she describes. Similarly, an antiwar speech is a primary source. So is the arrest record of student protesters. A newspaper editorial or article, reporting on a student demonstration is also a primary source.

Deeds, wills, court documents, military records, tax records, census records, diaries, journals, letters, account books, advertisements, newspapers, photographs, and maps are primary sources.

Secondary sources are created by someone who was either not present when the event occurred or removed from it in time. We use secondary sources for overview information, and to help familiarize ourselves with a topic and compare that topic with other events in history.

History books, encyclopedias, historical dictionaries, and academic articles are secondary sources.

If you've never written a research paper using primary sources, it is important to understand that the process is different from using only secondary sources. Many students discover that finding and gaining access to primary source documents can be difficult. The Library website has a valuable guide to locating primary source documents. Follow the link below to be redirected to that guide:

https://libguides.furman.edu/resources/primary-sources

• Students are encouraged to seek help from the Special Collections Librarian or Research Librarians to aid in their research projects. Librarians will be able to aid students in a variety of ways including helping to locate primary source materials.

After locating appropriate primary sources, it is necessary for students to analyze and interpret them. To many students, this task can seem arduous, if not overwhelming. There are many resources available in the library as well as online, which are helpful. The National Archives website has very useful analysis worksheets that can help students to determine the significance of primary source documents. Links to PDF files of these worksheets are listed below:

Written Document | Artifact | Cartoon | Map | Motion Picture | Photograph | Poster | Sound Recording

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Program Teachers

MLA CITATION FORMAT (MLA Handbook, 8th ed., p. 20)

• Title of Source
• Title of Container (larger work, such as an anthology)
• Other Contributors
• Publication Date
• Date of access (recommended for online resources)

Entire Website

The website of the Library of Congress connects users to content areas created by the Library’s many experts. In some cases, content can be posted without a clear indication of author, title, publisher, or publication date. Look for available clues and give as much information as possible, including the URL and date accessed.

MLA Citation Format (MLA Handbook, 8th ed.)

• Name of the author, compiler, director, editor, narrator, performer, or translator of the work (when the site is also the publisher omit here and instead place in publisher section)
• Title of the work (italicized if the work is independent; in roman type and quotation marks if the work is part of a larger work)
• Title of the overall website (italicized), if distinct from item 2
• Version or edition used
• Publisher or sponsor of the site; omit if not available.
• Date of publication; omit if not available.
• DOI or URL (DOI is encouraged and “http://” is left out)

Examples: Last name, First name. “Section of Website.” Title of the Website, Other Contributors, Version, Number, Name of publisher or sponsor, Date of publication, DOI or URL. Day Month Year of access. opt. URL.

Library of Congress. United States Government, 10 Feb 2012, www.loc.gov/. Accessed 16 Feb. 2017.

Articles and Essays

Articles and essays include examples that illustrate collection themes. Many collections include specific items, such as timelines, family trees or scholarly essays, which are not primary source documents. Such content has been created to enhance understanding of the collection. If no author is named, in most cases The Library of Congress may be cited as the author.

MLA Citation Format: (MLA Handbook, 8th ed.)

• Author last name, author first name
• Title (italicized if independent; in roman type and quotation marks if the work is part of a larger work)
• Title of the overall website (italicized)
• Version or edition
• Publisher; omit if not available
• Date of publication (day, month, year); omit if not available
• Date of access

Examples: Last name, First name. Title. Title of the Website, Version or edition, Publisher,. Day Month Year of publication, URL. Day Month Year of access.

Brief History of the National Parks. Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/collection/national-parks-maps/special-presentation/. Accessed 10 Feb. 2012.

Cartoons and Illustrations

Cartoons and illustrations included in newspapers, magazines or other periodicals often represent the historical perspectives and opinions of the time of publication. This illustration, Join or Die from the May 9, 1754, Pennsylvania Gazette, was published by Benjamin Franklin and expresses his views about the need for the colonies to join forces to confront their mutual concerns with England. This is often referred to as the first political cartoon.

MLA Citation Format: (MLA Handbook,8th ed.)

• Artist last name, artist first name
• Title of work (in quotation marks)
• Format (cartoon or illustration)
• Title of Container (website or database) italicized
• Newspapers: Name of Print Publication date, page numbers (mark as pp. #)
• Journals: Volume number, date of publication, page number (mark as pp. #)
• Books: City: Name of Publisher, date of publication, page numbers if being referenced (mark as pp. #).
• DOI or URL.

Examples: Last Name, First Name. “Title.” Illustration. Newspaper title, [Location], Day Month Year of publication, page number, opt. URL. Day Month Year of access.

Franklin, Benjamin. "Join or Die." Illustration. The Pennsylvania Gazette, 9 May 1754, Library of Congress , www.loc.gov/item/2014647887/. Accessed 16 Feb. 2017.

Films and other moving images offer visual tools for studying not only the technology of a time, but also the prevailing social attitudes.

• Film Title (quotation marks)
• Director Name or relevant creator name, e.g., Dir. John Doe
• Title of Container (original producer) italicized, original production date.
• Version (if it is edited—e.g., director’s cut)
• Number (if within a set of episodes or section—e.g., part two)
• Title of database or website (italicized)
• Publication Date (omit if not shown)
• Location (DOI, URL)

Examples: “Film Title.” Directed by First name Last Name, Distributor, version, number, Title of the Website , Day Month Year, URL. Day Month Year of access.

Filmed by Frederick S. Armitage. “Bargain Day, 14th Street, New York.”, American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1905. Library of Congress,10 Aug. 2012, www.loc.gov/item/00694373. Accessed 16 Feb. 2017.

Government Publications

Many government publications originate through executive departments, federal agencies, and the United States Congress. Many of the documents are chronicled records of government proceedings, which become part of the Congressional Record. These documents are often posted without a clear indication of author, title, publisher or copyright date. Look for available clues and give as much information as possible, including date accessed.

• Name of government
• Name of agency
• Title of the publication (italicized)
• Publisher, year published.
• Title of the database or website (italicized)
• Congressional information or location (if applicable)

Examples: Government. Agency name. Title of Publication, page numbers. Publisher, Year published. Title of the Website. URL. Congressional information or location (opt.). Location. Day Month Year of access.

United States, House of Representatives. Annals of Congress, pp. 747-48. Gales and Seaton, 1849. Library of Congress . memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ ampage?collId=llac&fileName=llac003.db&recNum=370. Proceedings, 2nd Congress, 2nd session. Accessed 16 Feb. 2017.

Manuscripts

The Library of Congress online collections include letters, diaries, recollections, and other written material. One example is this letter from Helen Keller to Mr. John Hitz. Helen describes her trip to Chicago to visit the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.

MLA Citation Format: (MLA Handbook, 8th ed.).

• Title (italicized, or quotation marks for a minor work)
• Date of composition (omit if not shown; for uncertain dates place a question mark—e.g. 1870?)
• Name of library, institution, or collection which houses the work, followed by the location
• Form of the material (version) – (Manuscript or Typescript)
• Publisher or website (italicized)

Examples: Last name, First name. “Title.” Date. Institution, city. Form of the material. Title of the Website. URL. Day Month Year of access.

Keller, Helen. “Letter to John Hitz 29 Aug. 1893.” 1893, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Typescript. Library of Congress. www.loc.gov/item/magbellbib004020. Accessed 16 Feb. 2017.

Maps and Charts

Maps are far more than just maps of cities and towns. They document historical places, events, and populations, as well as growth and changes over time. This map is from the Library of Congress online collections.

• Cartographer or Creator
• Title (italicized; in roman type and quotation marks if the work is part of a larger work)
• Title of Container (if part of a larger work, include that title, italicized, after the format)
• Format (map or chart)
• Publisher date

Cartographer. Title, Title of Container, Other Contributors, Map. Publisher, date, Location, Title of the Website, URL. Day Month Year of access.

Map of the West Coast of Africa from Sierra Leone to Cape Palmas, including the Colony of Liberia, Map. Finley, 1830. Library of Congress , www.loc.gov/item/96680499. Accessed 10 Feb. 2012.

Historic newspapers provide a glimpse of historic time periods. The articles, as well as the advertising, are an appealing way to get a look at the regions of the country or the world and the issues of the day.

• Author last name, author first name (if applicable)
• Title of article (in quotation marks)
• Name of newspaper (italicized), city of publication if needed, such as local, less-known newspapers (square brackets, not italicized)
• Version or Edition
• Issue Number
• Date of Access

“Free Education While You Wait For Orders Home.” The Stars and Stripes, 6 Dec. 1918. Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/sn88075768/1918-12-06/ed-1 . Accessed 10 Feb. 2012.

Oral History Interviews

MLA Citation Format: ( MLA Handbook , 8th ed.).

• Interviewee last name, first name
• Title of the interview (if any) In quotations if it is part of a publication, in italics if published independently. Use Interview without quotes or italics if there is no title
• Name of interviewer if known
• Publisher: Title of the database or website (italicized)
• Date of interview

Examples: Last name, First name. “Title of Interview.” By Name of Interviewer, Day Month Year of Interview. Title of the Website, URL. Day Month Year of access.

Patton, Gwendolen M. “Gwendolyn M. Patton oral history interview conducted by Joseph Mosnier. in Montgomery, Alabama, 2011-06-01.” Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/afc2010039_crhp0020/. Accessed 16 Feb. 2017.

Photographs

Photographs and drawings appear in many of the Library of Congress digitized historical collections.

• Title (italicized)
• Date of composition
• Version (photograph)
• Title of Container (name of the institution it is housed), country or state.
• Date published URL or DOI

Examples: Last name, First name. Title. Date of composition, Photograph, Institution, Country. Title of the Website, Date published on site, URL. Day Month Year of access.

Askew, Thomas E. Four African American women seated on steps of building at Atlanta University, Georgia. 1899 [or 1900] Photograph, Library of Congress, Washington D.C., www.loc.gov/item/2018667213/. Accessed 26 Feb. 2024.

Sound Recordings

This recording of Thomas Mann performing Haste to the Wedding is an example of Anglo-American dance music on the dulcimer recorded in July, 1937.

• Creator last name, creator first name
• Title (quotation marks)
• Title of Container (e.g. album—italicized)
• Any additional performers are listed here – first name followed by last name
• Indicate the original audio format (CD, audiocassette, etc.)
• Manufacturer and year published/issued
• When citing a performance, list the date of the performance here, with the abbreviation “rec.” preceding the date

Examples: Last name, First name. “Song title.” Perf. First name Last name, Manufacturer, Year, Rec. Day Month Year Original format. Title of the Website, URL. Day Month Year of access.

Mann, Thomas. “Haste to the Wedding.” Rec. July 1937 by Sydney Robertson Cowell, 78 rpm. Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/2017700868/. Accessed 10 Feb. 2012.

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Information

Primary sources.

• What is a Primary Source
• Locating Primary Source Materials
• Using Primary Sources
• Digital Primary Sources
• Historic Newspapers
• Historic Census Data and Statistics

What is a Primary Source?

Definition of Primary Sources:  

A primary source is a piece of evidence created during the time you are studying. These sources offer an eye-witness view of a particular event. They can be any type of format, as long as you as the researcher are looking for the source's context: Who made this, and what was their perspective? What other sources describe the same events? Whose perspective isn't represented, and where can you find it? What was the world like when this thing was made? With primary sources, you will ask a lot of questions!

Some common types of records used as primary sources include:

• Original Documents , including eyewitness accounts or the first record of events such as diaries, speeches, letters, manuscripts, interviews, news film footage, autobiographies, or official records
• Creative Works such as literature, music, art, film, etc.
• Relics or Artifacts such as pottery, furniture, clothing, and buildings
• Data from original research whether statistical or scientific

Remember: you have to find context for your primary sources.

What is a Secondary Source?

Definition of a secondary source:.

A secondary source interprets and analyzes primary sources. Secondary sources may have pictures, quotes or graphics of primary sources in them. Some common types of secondary sources include:

• A journal/magazine article which interprets or reviews previous findings 
• A history textbook 
• A book about the effects of WWI 
• Biographies
• Encyclopedia articles

Remember: a secondary source is making an argument based on research from other primary and secondary sources.

Primary Sources by Discipline

Different academic disciplines have different definitions of what constitutes a primary source:.

In the Humanities (history, literature, religion), primary sources focus on original documents or accounts contemporary to a specific event or an individual’s life. Terms such as “eyewitness” or “firsthand” are also commonly used to describe these sources. Autobiographical accounts written at a later date are also considered primary sources. Letters, diaries, journal entries, public records as well as contemporaneous newspapers articles offer solid examples of this type of primary source. Fictional works such as short stories or novels written during that specific time period constitute primary documents, too.

In the Arts (art, dance, music, theatre), primary sources are as diverse as the various disciplines in the category. They may include paintings, sculpture, prints, performances, video or audio recordings, scripts, or musical scores. Social Sciences (psychology, sociology, education) place a heavy emphasis on unanalyzed data sets as primary sources. Numerical data sets such as census figures, opinion polls, surveys or interview transcripts constitute this type of raw, uninterpreted data. A researcher’s field notes are also primary sources in the social sciences. In the Sciences (biology, ecology, chemistry), primary source documents focus on original research, ideas, or findings published in academic journals. These articles mark the first publication of such research; and they detail the researcher’s methodology and results. Plant or mineral samples and other artifacts are primary sources as well.

In STEM fields , primary sources may include papers or proceedings from scientific conferences; journal articles sharing original research, technical reports, patents, lab notes, and researcher correspondence or diaries.

Portions borrowed from Berea College Hutchins Library

• Next: Locating Primary Source Materials >>

Is it a primary source?

Are you using a primary source?

It depends on the questions you're asking!

Primary Resources Presentation Slides

Primary vs. secondary sources, differentiating primary and secondary sources in each discipline.

While primary sources offer a firsthand account, secondary sources are written after the fact. Secondary sources analyze, interpret, explain, or analyze a primary source, event or individual. These resources represent a second publication cycle, tasked with presenting an argument or to persuade the reader.

Borrowed from Indiana University Bloomington Libraries

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Primary Sources - An Introductory Guide

What is a primary source.

• Primary Sources at Seton Hall University Libraries
• Additional Resources
• Writing & Citing

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Where are Primary Sources?

Primary sources can be found in many different places, but the most common places to find them are libraries, archives, museums, and in the case of digitized primary sources, online databases.

Libraries carry many primary sources, especially newspapers (often on microfilm or in a database), memoirs, autobiographies, maps, audio and video materials, and published collections of letters, diaries, and interviews. Many of these can be found using the library's catalog. Many library materials can be borrowed.

Archives are collections of materials, often rare or unique, generated or created by individuals or organizations, that are of historical value and which are kept and preserved for the use of current and future communities. Many archives are located within libraries or museums, and are usually dedicated to a particular organization, geographic area, subject, or some combination of these. Materials that are collected by archives are often collections of papers, manuscripts, photographs, maps, drawings, sound or video records, objects, and many other formats, many of which are primary sources.

Museums collect, preserve, and display objects of historical or cultural significance. Primary sources found in museums include artifacts, art, maps, tablets, sound and video recordings, furniture, and realia.

Databases of primary sources often include sigitized or scanned primary sources that are related by subject, time period, or institutions that maintain the original sources. Several primary source databases can be found via the SHU Libraries website.

A primary source is a first-hand or contemporary account of an event or topic.

Primary sources are the most direct evidence of a time or event because they were created by people or things that were there at the time or event. These sources offer original thought and have not been modified by interpretation. Primary sources are original materials, regardless of format.

Examples of Primary Sources

• photographs
• sound and video recordings
• oral histories
• newspaper articles
• journal articles
• research studies
• autobiographies

Primary sources may be transformed from their original format into a newer one, such as when materials are published or digitized, but the contents are still primary. There are many primary sources available online today, but many more are still available in their original format, in archives, museums, libraries, historical sites, and elsewhere.

What is Not a Primary Source?

Secondary sources.

Secondary sources usually use primary sources and offer interpretation, analysis, or commentary. These resources often present primary source information with the addition of hindsight or historical perspective. Common examples include criticisms, histories, and magazine, journal, or newspaper articles written after the fact. Some secondary sources may also be considered primary or tertiary sources - the definition of this term is not set in stone.

Tertiary Sources

Tertiary sources are further developments of secondary sources, often summaries of information found in primary and secondary sources and collecting many sources together. Some examples of tertiary sources are encyclopedias and textbooks. Again, this term is not set in stone - some sources may be both secondary and tertiary.

Additional Primary & Secondary Source Sites

• What Makes A Primary Source A Primary Source - Library of Congress Teaching With The Library of Congress Informational Site.
• Primary Sources: A Research Guide - University of Massachusetts-Boston Description and examples of Primary vs. Secondary Sources
• What Is A Secondary Source? - Harvard University This guide serves as an introductory-level companion to the Harvard University Library Research Guide for the History of Science
• Primary Sources - Society of American Archivists Founded in 1936, the Society of American Archivists is North America's oldest and largest national professional association dedicated to the needs and interests of archives and archivists. SAA represents more than 6,200 professional archivists employed by governments, universities, businesses, libraries, and historical organizations nationally.

Find out more!

There are many good explanations and discussions of primary sources and how to use them. For more information, check out these sites:

Primary sources at Yale: What are primary sources?

ArchivesHub: Using Archives

University of Maryland Guide to Primary Sources

• Next: Primary Sources at Seton Hall University Libraries >>
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Primary Sources: What They Are and Where to Find Them

What is a primary source.

• Finding Primary Sources in the UWRF Library

A primary source is an original object or document created during the time under study.   Primary sources vary by discipline and can include historical and legal documents, diaries, letters, family records, speeches, interviews, autobiographies, film, government documents, eye witness accounts, results of an experiment, statistical data, pieces of creative writing, and art objects. In the natural and social sciences, the results of an experiment or study are typically found in scholarly articles or papers delivered at conferences, so those articles and papers that present the original results are considered primary sources.  

A secondary source is something written about a primary source. Secondary sources include comments on, interpretations of, or discussions about the original material. You can think of secondary sources as second-hand information. If I tell you something, I am the primary source. If you tell someone else what I told you, you are the secondard source. Secondary source materials can be articles in newspapers or popular magazines, book or movie reviews, or articles found in scholarly journals that evaluate or criticize someone else's original research.

Research versus Review

Scientific and other peer reviewed journals are excellent sources for primary research sources. However, not every article in those journals will be an article with original research. Some will include book reviews and other materials that are more obviously secondary sources . More difficult to differentiate from original research articles are review articles . Both types of articles will end with a list of References (or Works Cited). Review articles are often as lengthy or even longer that original research articles. What the authors of review articles are doing is analysing and evaluating current research or investigations related to a specific topic, field, or problem. They are not primary sources since they review previously published material. They can be helpful for identifying potentially good primary sources, but they aren't primary themselves. Primary research articles can be identified by a commonly used format. If an article contains the following elements, you can count on it being a primary research article. Look for sections entitled Methods (sometimes with variations, such as Materials and Methods), Results (usually followed with charts and statistical tables), and Discussion . You can also read the abstract to get a good sense of the kind of article that is being presented. If it is a review article instead of a research article, the abstract should make that clear. If there is no abstract at all, that in itself may be a sign that it is not a primary resource. Short research articles, such as those found in Science and similar scientific publications that mix news, editorials, and forums with research reports, may not include any of those elements. In those cases look at the words the authors use, phrases such as "we tested," "we used," and "in our study, we measured" will tell you that the article is reporting on original research.

Primary or Secondary: You Decide

The distinction between types of sources can get tricky, because a secondary source may also be a primary source. DoVeanna Fulton's book on slave narratives, for example, can be looked at as both a secondary and a primary source. The distinction may depend on how you are using the source and the nature of your research. If you are researching slave narratives, the book would be a secondary source because Fulton is commenting on the narratives. If your assignment is to write a book review of Speaking Power , the book becomes a primary source, because you are commenting, evaluating, and discussing DoVeanna Fulton's ideas.

You can't always determine if something is primary or secondary just because of the source it is found in. Articles in newspapers and magazines are usually considered secondary sources. However, if a story in a newspaper about the Iraq war is an eyewitness account, that would be a primary source. If the reporter, however, includes additional materials he or she has gathered through interviews or other investigations, the article would be a secondary source. An interview in the Rolling Stone with Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes would be a primary source, but a review of the latest Black Crowes album would be a secondary source. In contrast, scholarly journals include research articles with primary materials, but they also have review articles that are not, or in some disciplines include articles where scholars are looking at primary source materials and coming to new conclusions.

For your thinking and not just to confuse you even further, some experts include tertiary sources as an additional distinction to make. These are sources that compile or, especially, digest other sources. Some reference materials and textbooks are considered tertiary sources when their chief purpose is to list or briefly summarize or, from an even further removed distance, repackage ideas. This is the reason that you may be advised not to include an encyclopedia article in a final bibliography.

The above material was adapted from the excellent explanation written by John Henderson found on Ithaca College's library website http://www.ithacalibrary.com/sp/subjects/primary and is used with permission.

• Next: Finding Primary Sources in the UWRF Library >>
• Last Updated: Nov 8, 2023 3:51 PM
• URL: https://libguides.uwrf.edu/primarysources

Frequently asked questions

What are some examples of primary sources.

Common examples of primary sources include interview transcripts , photographs, novels, paintings, films, historical documents, and official statistics.

Anything you directly analyze or use as first-hand evidence can be a primary source, including qualitative or quantitative data that you collected yourself.

Frequently asked questions: Citing sources

A scientific citation style is a system of source citation that is used in scientific disciplines. Some commonly used scientific citation styles are:

• Chicago author-date , CSE , and Harvard , used across various sciences
• ACS , used in chemistry
• AMA , NLM , and Vancouver , used in medicine and related disciplines
• AAA , APA , and ASA , commonly used in the social sciences

There are many different citation styles used across different academic disciplines, but they fall into three basic approaches to citation:

• Parenthetical citations : Including identifying details of the source in parentheses —usually the author’s last name and the publication date, plus a page number if available ( author-date ). The publication date is occasionally omitted ( author-page ).
• Numerical citations: Including a number in brackets or superscript, corresponding to an entry in your numbered reference list.
• Note citations: Including a full citation in a footnote or endnote , which is indicated in the text with a superscript number or symbol.

A source annotation in an annotated bibliography fulfills a similar purpose to an abstract : they’re both intended to summarize the approach and key points of a source.

However, an annotation may also evaluate the source , discussing the validity and effectiveness of its arguments. Even if your annotation is purely descriptive , you may have a different perspective on the source from the author and highlight different key points.

You should never just copy text from the abstract for your annotation, as doing so constitutes plagiarism .

Most academics agree that you shouldn’t cite Wikipedia as a source in your academic writing , and universities often have rules against doing so.

This is partly because of concerns about its reliability, and partly because it’s a tertiary source. Tertiary sources are things like encyclopedias and databases that collect information from other sources rather than presenting their own evidence or analysis. Usually, only primary and secondary sources are cited in academic papers.

A Wikipedia citation usually includes the title of the article, “Wikipedia” and/or “Wikimedia Foundation,” the date the article was last updated, and the URL.

In APA Style , you’ll give the URL of the current revision of the article so that you’re sure the reader accesses the same version as you.

There’s some disagreement about whether Wikipedia can be considered a reliable source . Because it can be edited by anyone, many people argue that it’s easy for misleading information to be added to an article without the reader knowing.

Others argue that because Wikipedia articles cite their sources , and because they are worked on by so many editors, misinformation is generally removed quickly.

However, most universities state that you shouldn’t cite Wikipedia in your writing.

Hanging indents are used in reference lists in various citation styles to allow the reader to easily distinguish between entries.

You should apply a hanging indent to your reference entries in APA , MLA , and Chicago style.

A hanging indent is used to indent all lines of a paragraph except the first.

When you create a hanging indent, the first line of the paragraph starts at the border. Each subsequent line is indented 0.5 inches (1.27 cm).

APA and MLA style both use parenthetical in-text citations to cite sources and include a full list of references at the end, but they differ in other ways:

• APA in-text citations include the author name, date, and page number (Taylor, 2018, p. 23), while MLA in-text citations include only the author name and page number (Taylor 23).
• The APA reference list is titled “References,” while MLA’s version is called “ Works Cited .”
• The reference entries differ in terms of formatting and order of information.
• APA requires a title page , while MLA requires a header instead.

A parenthetical citation in Chicago author-date style includes the author’s last name, the publication date, and, if applicable, the relevant page number or page range in parentheses . Include a comma after the year, but not after the author’s name.

For example: (Swan 2003, 6)

To automatically generate accurate Chicago references, you can use Scribbr’s free Chicago reference generator .

APA Style distinguishes between parenthetical and narrative citations.

In parenthetical citations , you include all relevant source information in parentheses at the end of the sentence or clause: “Parts of the human body reflect the principles of tensegrity (Levin, 2002).”

In narrative citations , you include the author’s name in the text itself, followed by the publication date in parentheses: “Levin (2002) argues that parts of the human body reflect the principles of tensegrity.”

In a parenthetical citation in MLA style , include the author’s last name and the relevant page number or range in parentheses .

For example: (Eliot 21)

A parenthetical citation gives credit in parentheses to a source that you’re quoting or paraphrasing . It provides relevant information such as the author’s name, the publication date, and the page number(s) cited.

How you use parenthetical citations will depend on your chosen citation style . It will also depend on the type of source you are citing and the number of authors.

APA does not permit the use of ibid. This is because APA in-text citations are parenthetical and there’s no need to shorten them further.

Ibid. may be used in Chicago footnotes or endnotes .

Write “Ibid.” alone when you are citing the same page number and source as the previous citation.

When you are citing the same source, but a different page number, use ibid. followed by a comma and the relevant page number(s). For example:

• Ibid., 40–42.

Only use ibid . if you are directing the reader to a previous full citation of a source .

Ibid. only refers to the previous citation. Therefore, you should only use ibid. directly after a citation that you want to repeat.

Ibid. is an abbreviation of the Latin “ibidem,” meaning “in the same place.” Ibid. is used in citations to direct the reader to the previous source.

Signal phrases can be used in various ways and can be placed at the beginning, middle, or end of a sentence.

To use signal phrases effectively, include:

• The name of the scholar(s) or study you’re referencing
• An attributive tag such as “according to” or “argues that”
• The quote or idea you want to include

Different citation styles require you to use specific verb tenses when using signal phrases.

• APA Style requires you to use the past or present perfect tense when using signal phrases.
• MLA and Chicago requires you to use the present tense when using signal phrases.

Signal phrases allow you to give credit for an idea or quote to its author or originator. This helps you to:

• Establish the credentials of your sources
• Display your depth of reading and understanding of the field
• Position your own work in relation to other scholars
• Avoid plagiarism

A signal phrase is a group of words that ascribes a quote or idea to an outside source.

Signal phrases distinguish the cited idea or argument from your own writing and introduce important information including the source of the material that you are quoting , paraphrasing , or summarizing . For example:

“ Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker (1994) insists that humans possess an innate faculty for comprehending grammar.”

If you’re quoting from a text that paraphrases or summarizes other sources and cites them in parentheses , APA and Chicago both recommend retaining the citations as part of the quote. However, MLA recommends omitting citations within a quote:

• APA: Smith states that “the literature on this topic (Jones, 2015; Sill, 2019; Paulson, 2020) shows no clear consensus” (Smith, 2019, p. 4).
• MLA: Smith states that “the literature on this topic shows no clear consensus” (Smith, 2019, p. 4).

Footnote or endnote numbers that appear within quoted text should be omitted in all styles.

If you want to cite an indirect source (one you’ve only seen quoted in another source), either locate the original source or use the phrase “as cited in” in your citation.

In scientific subjects, the information itself is more important than how it was expressed, so quoting should generally be kept to a minimum. In the arts and humanities, however, well-chosen quotes are often essential to a good paper.

In social sciences, it varies. If your research is mainly quantitative , you won’t include many quotes, but if it’s more qualitative , you may need to quote from the data you collected .

As a general guideline, quotes should take up no more than 5–10% of your paper. If in doubt, check with your instructor or supervisor how much quoting is appropriate in your field.

To present information from other sources in academic writing , it’s best to paraphrase in most cases. This shows that you’ve understood the ideas you’re discussing and incorporates them into your text smoothly.

It’s appropriate to quote when:

• Changing the phrasing would distort the meaning of the original text
• You want to discuss the author’s language choices (e.g., in literary analysis )
• You’re presenting a precise definition
• You’re looking in depth at a specific claim

To paraphrase effectively, don’t just take the original sentence and swap out some of the words for synonyms. Instead, try:

• Reformulating the sentence (e.g., change active to passive , or start from a different point)
• Combining information from multiple sentences into one
• Leaving out information from the original that isn’t relevant to your point
• Using synonyms where they don’t distort the meaning

The main point is to ensure you don’t just copy the structure of the original text, but instead reformulate the idea in your own words.

“ Et al. ” is an abbreviation of the Latin term “et alia,” which means “and others.” It’s used in source citations to save space when there are too many authors to name them all.

Guidelines for using “et al.” differ depending on the citation style you’re following:

To insert endnotes in Microsoft Word, follow the steps below:

• Click on the spot in the text where you want the endnote to show up.
• In the “References” tab at the top, select “Insert Endnote.”
• Type whatever text you want into the endnote.

If you need to change the type of notes used in a Word document from footnotes to endnotes , or the other way around, follow these steps:

• Open the “References” tab, and click the arrow in the bottom-right corner of the “Footnotes” section.
• In the pop-up window, click on “Convert…”
• Choose the option you need, and click “OK.”

To insert a footnote automatically in a Word document:

• Click on the point in the text where the footnote should appear
• Select the “References” tab at the top and then click on “Insert Footnote”
• Type the text you want into the footnote that appears at the bottom of the page

Footnotes are notes indicated in your text with numbers and placed at the bottom of the page. They’re used to provide:

• Citations (e.g., in Chicago notes and bibliography )
• Additional information that would disrupt the flow of the main text

Be sparing in your use of footnotes (other than citation footnotes), and consider whether the information you’re adding is relevant for the reader.

Footnotes appear at the bottom of the page they refer to. This is convenient for the reader but may cause your text to look cluttered if there are a lot of footnotes.

Endnotes appear all together at the end of the whole text. This may be less convenient for the reader but reduces clutter.

Both footnotes and endnotes are used in the same way: to cite sources or add extra information. You should usually choose one or the other to use in your text, not both.

An in-text citation is an acknowledgement you include in your text whenever you quote or paraphrase a source. It usually gives the author’s last name, the year of publication, and the page number of the relevant text. In-text citations allow the reader to look up the full source information in your reference list and see your sources for themselves.

If you are reusing content or data you used in a previous assignment, make sure to cite yourself. You can cite yourself just as you would cite any other source: simply follow the directions for that source type in the citation style you are using.

Keep in mind that reusing your previous work can be considered self-plagiarism , so make sure you ask your professor or consult your university’s handbook before doing so.

A credible source should pass the CRAAP test  and follow these guidelines:

• The information should be up to date and current.
• The author and publication should be a trusted authority on the subject you are researching.
• The sources the author cited should be easy to find, clear, and unbiased.
• For a web source, the URL and layout should signify that it is trustworthy.

Peer review is a process of evaluating submissions to an academic journal. Utilizing rigorous criteria, a panel of reviewers in the same subject area decide whether to accept each submission for publication. For this reason, academic journals are often considered among the most credible sources you can use in a research project– provided that the journal itself is trustworthy and well-regarded.

Academic dishonesty can be intentional or unintentional, ranging from something as simple as claiming to have read something you didn’t to copying your neighbor’s answers on an exam.

You can commit academic dishonesty with the best of intentions, such as helping a friend cheat on a paper. Severe academic dishonesty can include buying a pre-written essay or the answers to a multiple-choice test, or falsifying a medical emergency to avoid taking a final exam.

Academic dishonesty refers to deceitful or misleading behavior in an academic setting. Academic dishonesty can occur intentionally or unintentionally, and varies in severity.

It can encompass paying for a pre-written essay, cheating on an exam, or committing plagiarism . It can also include helping others cheat, copying a friend’s homework answers, or even pretending to be sick to miss an exam.

Academic dishonesty doesn’t just occur in a classroom setting, but also in research and other academic-adjacent fields.

To apply a hanging indent to your reference list or Works Cited list in Word or Google Docs, follow the steps below.

Microsoft Word:

• Highlight the whole list and right click to open the Paragraph options.
• Under Indentation > Special , choose Hanging from the dropdown menu.
• Set the indent to 0.5 inches or 1.27cm.

Google Docs:

• Highlight the whole list and click on Format >  Align and indent >  Indentation options .
• Under  Special indent , choose Hanging from the dropdown menu.

When the hanging indent is applied, for each reference, every line except the first is indented. This helps the reader see where one entry ends and the next begins.

For a published interview (whether in video , audio, or print form ), you should always include a citation , just as you would for any other source.

For an interview you conducted yourself , formally or informally, you often don’t need a citation and can just refer to it in the text or in a footnote , since the reader won’t be able to look them up anyway. MLA , however, still recommends including citations for your own interviews.

The main elements included in a newspaper interview citation across APA , MLA , and Chicago style are the names of the interviewer and interviewee, the interview title, the publication date, the name of the newspaper, and a URL (for online sources).

The information is presented differently in different citation styles. One key difference is that APA advises listing the interviewer in the author position, while MLA and Chicago advise listing the interviewee first.

The elements included in a newspaper article citation across APA , MLA , and Chicago style are the author name, the article title, the publication date, the newspaper name, and the URL if the article was accessed online .

In APA and MLA, the page numbers of the article appear in place of the URL if the article was accessed in print. No page numbers are used in Chicago newspaper citations.

Untitled sources (e.g. some images ) are usually cited using a short descriptive text in place of the title. In APA Style , this description appears in brackets: [Chair of stained oak]. In MLA and Chicago styles, no brackets are used: Chair of stained oak.

For social media posts, which are usually untitled, quote the initial words of the post in place of the title: the first 160 characters in Chicago , or the first 20 words in APA . E.g. Biden, J. [@JoeBiden]. “The American Rescue Plan means a $7,000 check for a single mom of four. It means more support to safely.”

MLA recommends quoting the full post for something short like a tweet, and just describing the post if it’s longer.

The main elements included in image citations across APA , MLA , and Chicago style are the name of the image’s creator, the image title, the year (or more precise date) of publication, and details of the container in which the image was found (e.g. a museum, book , website ).

In APA and Chicago style, it’s standard to also include a description of the image’s format (e.g. “Photograph” or “Oil on canvas”). This sort of information may be included in MLA too, but is not mandatory.

The main elements included in a lecture citation across APA , MLA , and Chicago style are the name of the speaker, the lecture title, the date it took place, the course or event it was part of, and the institution it took place at.

For transcripts or recordings of lectures/speeches, other details like the URL, the name of the book or website , and the length of the recording may be included instead of information about the event and institution.

The main elements included in a YouTube video citation across APA , MLA , and Chicago style are the name of the author/uploader, the title of the video, the publication date, and the URL.

The format in which this information appears is different for each style.

All styles also recommend using timestamps as a locator in the in-text citation or Chicago footnote .

Each annotation in an annotated bibliography is usually between 50 and 200 words long. Longer annotations may be divided into paragraphs .

The content of the annotation varies according to your assignment. An annotation can be descriptive, meaning it just describes the source objectively; evaluative, meaning it assesses its usefulness; or reflective, meaning it explains how the source will be used in your own research .

Any credible sources on your topic can be included in an annotated bibliography . The exact sources you cover will vary depending on the assignment, but you should usually focus on collecting journal articles and scholarly books . When in doubt, utilize the CRAAP test !

An annotated bibliography is an assignment where you collect sources on a specific topic and write an annotation for each source. An annotation is a short text that describes and sometimes evaluates the source.

The elements included in journal article citations across APA , MLA , and Chicago style are the name(s) of the author(s), the title of the article, the year of publication, the name of the journal, the volume and issue numbers, the page range of the article, and, when accessed online, the DOI or URL.

In MLA and Chicago style, you also include the specific month or season of publication alongside the year, when this information is available.

In APA , MLA , and Chicago style citations for sources that don’t list a specific author (e.g. many websites ), you can usually list the organization responsible for the source as the author.

If the organization is the same as the website or publisher, you shouldn’t repeat it twice in your reference:

• In APA and Chicago, omit the website or publisher name later in the reference.
• In MLA, omit the author element at the start of the reference, and cite the source title instead.

If there’s no appropriate organization to list as author, you will usually have to begin the citation and reference entry with the title of the source instead.

The main elements included in website citations across APA , MLA , and Chicago style are the author, the date of publication, the page title, the website name, and the URL. The information is presented differently in each style.

When you want to cite a specific passage in a source without page numbers (e.g. an e-book or website ), all the main citation styles recommend using an alternate locator in your in-text citation . You might use a heading or chapter number, e.g. (Smith, 2016, ch. 1)

In APA Style , you can count the paragraph numbers in a text to identify a location by paragraph number. MLA and Chicago recommend that you only use paragraph numbers if they’re explicitly marked in the text.

For audiovisual sources (e.g. videos ), all styles recommend using a timestamp to show a specific point in the video when relevant.

The abbreviation “ et al. ” (Latin for “and others”) is used to shorten citations of sources with multiple authors.

“Et al.” is used in APA in-text citations of sources with 3+ authors, e.g. (Smith et al., 2019). It is not used in APA reference entries .

Use “et al.” for 3+ authors in MLA in-text citations and Works Cited entries.

Use “et al.” for 4+ authors in a Chicago in-text citation , and for 10+ authors in a Chicago bibliography entry.

Check if your university or course guidelines specify which citation style to use. If the choice is left up to you, consider which style is most commonly used in your field.

• APA Style is the most popular citation style, widely used in the social and behavioral sciences.
• MLA style is the second most popular, used mainly in the humanities.
• Chicago notes and bibliography style is also popular in the humanities, especially history.
• Chicago author-date style tends to be used in the sciences.

Other more specialized styles exist for certain fields, such as Bluebook and OSCOLA for law.

The most important thing is to choose one style and use it consistently throughout your text.

The main elements included in all book citations across APA , MLA , and Chicago style are the author, the title, the year of publication, and the name of the publisher. A page number is also included in in-text citations to highlight the specific passage cited.

In Chicago style and in the 6th edition of APA Style , the location of the publisher is also included, e.g. London: Penguin.

A block quote is a long quote formatted as a separate “block” of text. Instead of using quotation marks , you place the quote on a new line, and indent the entire quote to mark it apart from your own words.

The rules for when to apply block quote formatting depend on the citation style:

• APA block quotes are 40 words or longer.
• MLA block quotes are more than 4 lines of prose or 3 lines of poetry.
• Chicago block quotes are longer than 100 words.

In academic writing , there are three main situations where quoting is the best choice:

• To analyze the author’s language (e.g., in a literary analysis essay )
• To give evidence from primary sources
• To accurately present a precise definition or argument

Don’t overuse quotes; your own voice should be dominant. If you just want to provide information from a source, it’s usually better to paraphrase or summarize .

Every time you quote a source , you must include a correctly formatted in-text citation . This looks slightly different depending on the citation style .

For example, a direct quote in APA is cited like this: “This is a quote” (Streefkerk, 2020, p. 5).

Every in-text citation should also correspond to a full reference at the end of your paper.

A quote is an exact copy of someone else’s words, usually enclosed in quotation marks and credited to the original author or speaker.

The DOI is usually clearly visible when you open a journal article on an academic database. It is often listed near the publication date, and includes “doi.org” or “DOI:”. If the database has a “cite this article” button, this should also produce a citation with the DOI included.

If you can’t find the DOI, you can search on Crossref using information like the author, the article title, and the journal name.

A DOI is a unique identifier for a digital document. DOIs are important in academic citation because they are more permanent than URLs, ensuring that your reader can reliably locate the source.

Journal articles and ebooks can often be found on multiple different websites and databases. The URL of the page where an article is hosted can be changed or removed over time, but a DOI is linked to the specific document and never changes.

When a book’s chapters are written by different authors, you should cite the specific chapter you are referring to.

When all the chapters are written by the same author (or group of authors), you should usually cite the entire book, but some styles include exceptions to this.

• In APA Style , single-author books should always be cited as a whole, even if you only quote or paraphrase from one chapter.
• In MLA Style , if a single-author book is a collection of stand-alone works (e.g. short stories ), you should cite the individual work.
• In Chicago Style , you may choose to cite a single chapter of a single-author book if you feel it is more appropriate than citing the whole book.

Articles in newspapers and magazines can be primary or secondary depending on the focus of your research.

In historical studies, old articles are used as primary sources that give direct evidence about the time period. In social and communication studies, articles are used as primary sources to analyze language and social relations (for example, by conducting content analysis or discourse analysis ).

If you are not analyzing the article itself, but only using it for background information or facts about your topic, then the article is a secondary source.

A fictional movie is usually a primary source. A documentary can be either primary or secondary depending on the context.

If you are directly analyzing some aspect of the movie itself – for example, the cinematography, narrative techniques, or social context – the movie is a primary source.

If you use the movie for background information or analysis about your topic – for example, to learn about a historical event or a scientific discovery – the movie is a secondary source.

Whether it’s primary or secondary, always properly cite the movie in the citation style you are using. Learn how to create an MLA movie citation or an APA movie citation .

To determine if a source is primary or secondary, ask yourself:

• Was the source created by someone directly involved in the events you’re studying (primary), or by another researcher (secondary)?
• Does the source provide original information (primary), or does it summarize information from other sources (secondary)?
• Are you directly analyzing the source itself (primary), or only using it for background information (secondary)?

Some types of source are nearly always primary: works of art and literature, raw statistical data, official documents and records, and personal communications (e.g. letters, interviews ). If you use one of these in your research, it is probably a primary source.

Primary sources are often considered the most credible in terms of providing evidence for your argument, as they give you direct evidence of what you are researching. However, it’s up to you to ensure the information they provide is reliable and accurate.

Always make sure to properly cite your sources to avoid plagiarism .

Common examples of secondary sources include academic books, journal articles , reviews, essays , and textbooks.

Anything that summarizes, evaluates or interprets primary sources can be a secondary source. If a source gives you an overview of background information or presents another researcher’s ideas on your topic, it is probably a secondary source.

The Scribbr Citation Generator is developed using the open-source Citation Style Language (CSL) project and Frank Bennett’s citeproc-js . It’s the same technology used by dozens of other popular citation tools, including Mendeley and Zotero.

You can find all the citation styles and locales used in the Scribbr Citation Generator in our publicly accessible repository on Github .

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Department of History

Primary source essay.

This 3000-word source-based essay focuses on one primary source to shed light on material evaluation in the Enlightenment. To achieve this, the essay will also draw on other primary and secondary sources.

The essay will be marked using the usual history-specific marking criteria for written work . That said, a primary-source essay is a particular type of essay that calls for specific tasks that are not relevant to all other essays.

Like any other essay, this one needs to be an argument--it needs to state a thesis and make a case for that thesis. Unlike other essays, the argument of this essay will centre on a primary source. More details on the task are below.

The thesis. This needs to be related to the theme of the module, namely material evaluation in the Enlightenment. Beyond that, you are free to choose a topic as a function of your own knowledge and interests. It may help to consider some of the theses we have encountered in the secondary readings, such as Emma Spary's thesis that botanical expertise replaced scholarly expertise as the main way of evaluating coffee in France around 1700; or William Ashworth's thesis that the hydrometer was part of the political struggle between producers and the state in eighteenth-century Britain. Your thesis will probably be less ambitious than these, given the constraints of the assignment. But you may find these theses (by Spary, Ashworth, and the other historians we have read) a useful model to follow. The note under 'Contextualise' below may also be useful.

The primary source. This may be any primary source related to material evaluation in the Enlightenment. The one limitation is that it cannot be one of the primary sources we have discussed in detail in seminars, such as Robert Boyle's 1675 article on gold assaying in the Phil. Trans ., or Henry Drax's instructions on the management of a Barbadian sugar plantation. More precisely, you cannot choose the passages from these sources that we discussed in detail in class. For example, you may choose the sections on beer in Leadbetter's Royal Gauger , but not the sections on the distillery. The source may be a written document, but it may also be an object, diagram, painting, or any other historical artefact that sheds light on the past.

Finding a primary source . One way to find the source is through a relevant secondary source. If you are interested in connoisseurship in the fine arts, for example, you might look through the Warwick library catalogue for books on this topic related to the eighteenth century. You might then find, for example, Carol Gibson-Wood's book Jonathan Richardson: Art Theorist of the English Enlightenment , which in turn discusses many relevant primary sources. Another approach is to start with the primary sources themselves by searching through collections of relevant sources. Examples are:

The online archive of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London

Early English Books Online , a database of early modern English texts

The online archive of the English East India Company

Eighteenth-century encyclopaedias, such as Chambers' Cyclopaedia , the fourth edition of which has been digitised

The catalogues of public museums, such as the Oxford Museum for the History of Science and the British Museum

Virtual exhibitions, such as the Intoxicating Spaces exhibition or the Sugar and the Visual Imagination exhibition

Analysing the primary source. Analysing primary sources is more an art than a science, and there are no hard-and-fast rules about how to do it. However, for the purpose of this essay you should do at least the following:

Interpret. Decipher the source so that it can be understood by a non-specialist audience. This may mean explaining technical terms, rephrasing complicated sentences, identifying rhetorical devices or figures of speech, or (for long texts) summarising the argument or narrative.

Explain. Get behind the source to understand its conditions of production. Who was the author? Who was the intended audience? Why, when, how, and where was the source made? Which genre does it belong to (encyclopaedia article, scientific article, merchant correspondence...) and how does it fit into the history of that genre?

Contextualise. Relate the source to wider historical developments of the kind that we have covered in the module, such as the the growth of the fiscal-military state, the growth of a consumer culture, and the outbreak of the French Revolution.

The essay could be structured around these three tasks, with one section on each - but it does not need to be. The important thing is to do these three things as part of your research, and to integrate them into your argument.

Other sources. Although the essay should be centred on one primary source, it does not need to be limited to that source. Indeed, you will need to draw on other primary and secondary sources to make sense of the primary source that you focus on. The expectation is that you will draw on five (or more) secondary sources and one (or more) additional primary sources. The secondary sources can be made of books, book chapters, journal articles, or chapters in edited collections.

Meeting with tutor. All students are strongly encouraged to meet the tutor (during office hours ) to discuss their choice of primary source. This meeting can take place any time in term 2 before the essay deadline, but should be around the time you decide upon that source.

Finding Sources

Primary and secondary sources.

Knowing the difference between primary and secondary sources will help you determine what types of sources you may need to include in your research essay. In general, primary sources are original works (original historical documents, art works, interviews, etc.), while secondary sources contain others’ insights and writings about those primary works (scholar articles about historical documents, art works, interviews, etc.).

While many scholarly sources are secondary sources, you will sometimes be asked to find primary sources in your research. For this reason, you should understand the differences between primary, secondary, and tertiary sources.

• Primary sources allow researchers to get as close as possible to original ideas, events, and empirical research as possible. Such sources may include creative works, first hand or contemporary accounts of events, and the publication of the results of empirical observations or research. These include diaries, interviews, speeches, photographs, etc.
• Secondary sources analyze, review, or summarize information in primary resources or other secondary resources. Even sources presenting facts or descriptions about events are secondary unless they are based on direct participation or observation. These include biographies, journal articles, books, and dissertations.
• Tertiary sources provide overviews of topics by synthesizing information gathered from other resources. Tertiary resources often provide data in a convenient form or provide information with context by which to interpret it. These are often grouped together with secondary sources. They include encyclopedias and dictionaries.

Analyze your topic/working thesis to determine the types of sources that can help with support.  For example, if your topic deals with Van Gogh’s use of pale green and what it connotes in his later paintings, you will need to couple evidence from primary sources (images of the paintings themselves) with secondary sources (other scholars’ views, discussions, and logical arguments about the same topic).  If your working thesis deals with the benefits of regular exercise for older adults in their 70s-90s, you may couple evidence from primary sources (uninterpreted data from research studies, interviews with older adults or experts in the field) with secondary sources (interpretations of research studies).  In some cases, you may find that your research is mostly from secondary sources and that’s fine, depending on your topic and working thesis.  Just make sure to consider, consciously, the types of sources that can best be used to support your own ideas.

The following video provides a clear overview of primary and secondary sources.

• Primary and Secondary Sources. Revision and adaptation of the page What Are Scholarly Articles? at https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wm-englishcomposition1/chapter/text-intermediate-research-strategies/which is a revision and adaptation of the sources listed below. Authored by : Susan Oaks. Provided by : Empire State College, SUNY OER Services. Project : College Writing. License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
• What Are Scholarly Articles?. Provided by : Lumen Learning. Project : English Composition I. License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
• Primary, secondary, and tertiary sources. Provided by : Virginia Tech University Libraries. Located at : http://www.lib.vt.edu/help/research/primary-secondary-tertiary.html . License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
• Secondary Sources in their Natural Habitat. Authored by : Amy Guptill. Provided by : SUNY. Located at : http://pressbooks.opensuny.org/writing-in-college-from-competence-to-excellence/chapter/4/ . Project : Writing in College. License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
• Walk, Talk, Cook, Eat: A Guide to Using Sources. Authored by : Cynthia R. Haller. Provided by : Saylor. Located at : . Project : Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing Vol. 2. License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
• Scholarly Sources. Provided by : Boundless. Located at : https://www.boundless.com/writing/textbooks/boundless-writing-textbook/the-research-process-2/understanding-the-academic-context-of-your-topic-261/understanding-the-academic-context-of-your-topic-34-1667 . Project : Boundless Writing. License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
• image of open book. Authored by : Hermann. Provided by : Pixabay. Located at : https://pixabay.com/en/book-open-pages-library-books-408302 . License : CC0: No Rights Reserved
• video Understanding Primary & Secondary Sources. Provided by : Imagine Easy Solutions. Located at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmno-Yfetd8 . License : Other . License Terms : Standard YouTube License

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What is a primary source?

A primary source can be an article, document, diary, manuscript, object or information written or created at the time an event actually took place. Primary sources serve as an original source of information.

A primary source is a first-hand record of an event or topic created by a participant in or a witness to that event or topic. Primary sources can be a document, letter, eye-witness account, diary, article, book, recording, statistical data, manuscript, or art object. Primary sources vary by discipline and provide an original source of information about an era or event. Although primary sources can include first-hand accounts that were documented later, such as memoirs or oral histories, primary sources created or written closest to the time of the actual event are considered to be the most useful sources for research purposes.

A secondary source is second-hand information written or created after an event. Secondary sources may summarize, interpret, review, or criticize existing events or works.  Secondary sources were written or created after an event by people who were not at the original event. Secondary sources can be many formats including books, articles, encyclopedias, textbooks, or a scholar’s interpretation of past events or conditions.

Examples of Primary Sources and Secondary Sources:

Primary Source:                                                 Secondary Source:

An original painting by Mary Cassatt                   A book about the artist Mary Cassatt

President Lincoln's Gettysburg Address              An article about Abraham Lincoln

A photograph of Harry Houdini                            A website about Houdini's magic tricks

An original Gershwin musical score                     A recent recording of Gershwin songs                             

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21 Examples of Primary Sources (A to Z List)

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

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Primary sources are pieces of data directly connected to an event. Generally, the source was created at the time in which the event occurred.

A primary source is generally understood in contrast to a secondary source, which is a source that reports on and makes comments on primary sources after the fact.

Primary sources should reveal new data about something. By contrast, secondary sources simply comment on or re-examine existing data.

However, as we’ll explore, the distinction between primary and secondary sources becomes very unclear very quickly. This is because context and the scholarly field of study matter in defining something as a primary vs secondary source.

Primary Source Examples

1. artifacts (in archeology).

Artifacts in archeology are objects crafted by humans. Examples of artifacts include tools, pottery, and arrowheads that are found in excavations.

These artifacts provide new first-hand accounts of what life was like at the time. They aren’t recounts or reflections. They’re the actual physical objects from the era. They’re therefore considered primary sources for analysis.

When an artifact reveals information about the culture of the time, we call it a cultural artifact. Examples of cultural artifacts include artworks and children’s toys found in a dig.

2. Audio Recordings

Audio recordings of an event are considered primary sources. For example, recorded audio of Richard Nixon taking in the oval office during the watergate scandal is a primary source: it is literally a recording of him committing a crime.

However, audio recordings of interviews with people after the event (such as an interview that takes place 2 weeks after something has happened) could be primary or secondary, depending on the context and academic discipline.

In many cases post-event interviews are seen as secondary because they do not occur concurrent with the occasion. Hindsight and memory are too imperfect to consider this a primary source.

In other cases, audio recordings such as interviews taken after an event are most certainly primary sources. For example, interview research in social science research is generally seen as primary research (as opposed to, for example, a literature review , which is considered secondary research ).

3. Autobiographies and Memoirs

Autobiographies and memoirs are considered primary sources in instances where someone is studying the life of the writer.

In these cases, those accounts of a person by a person are direct reports that can give new insights or direct clarity about the person.

By contrast, a biography (a story written by an author about someone else) would be considered a secondary source because it is a journalistic piece written about rather than by the person.

4. Biofacts (in Archeology)

Biofacts are organic matter found in archeological excavations. They differ from artifacts because they’re not just crafted by humans; they’re actually natural objects like bones and shells.

A biofact, such as the bones of an Egyptian mummy, can reveal direct and unfiltered information about the people of the times. For example, they can give us unambiguous information about the height of humans during an era, how a human died, or whether a culture of humans in the past created jewelry out of shells.

A diary is arguably a better version of primary data than a memoir and further down the scale toward a primary source and away from a secondary source.

This is because diaries are usually written at the time of the event . They are written when the memory of things are fresh in the mind of the writer, meaning there is less fog of time and less time for memory to fade or change.

Emails are records of events that took place at the time in which they were occurring.

An email can therefore form compelling evidence that can be revealing of the thought processes of people under study. They can, for example, be produced as primary evidence during court hearings about a dispute between two people emailing one another.

Emails may become secondary sources if they are simply a typed-out opinion on an event . In this case, the opinionated email is only secondary data about the event on which a person is speaking as it’s not connected to the event directly.

7. Features (in Archeology)

In archeology, a feature is an immovable contextual piece found during an archeological survey. They help reveal information about the time and place.

Examples of features include hearths, remains of walls, and remains of firepits. They can help reveal information about the architecture of the day, how people cooked, and how large settlements were within a geographical area.

8. Government Documents

Government documents, such as records of births, deaths, and marriages, are primary sources about a time and place.

Historians look back at government documents from civilizations of the past to get information about the size of cities, the health of their citizens, and so forth.

In hundreds or thousands of years in the future, future civilizations may look at government records of today to get first-hand information about our society, as well.

9. Interviews

If you conduct an interview yourself and use it as data in a research study, then that interview is generally considered a primary source of data.

Interviews are, in fact, some of the most common ways to conduct primary research for undergraduate research students. They can be an integral part of straightforward qualitative research studies to help ease students into the world of primary research.

In some instances and by some academic standards, such as if an interview is a person’s recount of an event and you are analyzing “what happened during an event”, then it may be a secondary source.

But if the study is of “15 people’s opinions of an event”, then the interview in which they share their opinions will be a primary source.

Here, you can see that the research question (whether the focus is on the event or opinions of the event) is important in determining whether some things are primary or secondary sources.

10. Letters

A letter posted from one person to another can be a primary source for a historian looking to unveil new information about their relationship.

For example, love letters between couples separated during WWII would be compelling primary sources for a historian writing a book about soldiers and their wives during the war.

Similarly, were a biographer to find a letter of invitation for a person to attend a university, then that letter of invitation is compelling primary evidence that would confirm that they had, in fact, been accepted to study there.

11. Manuscripts

Manuscripts are the original copies of a book or essay. They can be extremely revealing of original data that took place before it had become distorted through transcriptions.

Historically, they were the original pieces written by hand before the manuscript was typed out and printed. Today, they can be the drafts written on a computer before editors requested edits.

One example of the search for the original manuscripts is the bible. The original manuscripts of many books of the bible are missing. People search out those manuscripts to find the exact original text given that meaning may have been lost over time with so much transcription over time.

Original maps, such as the maps drawn by explorers like Christopher Columbus and Captain James Cook, can reveal important first-hand information about the travels of those explorers.

These maps might be able to reveal information about what people were thinking at a certain time, their knowledge of their terrain, and even the extent of expansion of cities at certain times. 

Similarly, a map of a city from a particular year might reveal information about when some shops opened and when buildings were constructed.

13. Metadata

Metadata is data that gives contextual information about the data.

The best example is images on the internet. The image is the data, but the image file also contains information like:

• The name of the file
• When the file was created
• Where the file was created
• Who created the file
• Who owns the copyright
• A brief description of the photo (often called the alt tag)

This metadata can be extremely useful when doing forensic analysis.

For example, if detectives are trying to determine the sequence of events for a crime, they can look through phone records to identify where a person was at a certain time based on the metadata saying when, where, and to whom they made phone calls.

This metadata can help place someone at a crime scene or, alternatively, help exonerate someone from a crime by proving their alibi.

14. Newspapers and Magazine Clippings

Old magazine clippings can give us great insights into the events of the past.

When examining an event, the magazine clipping reporting on the event can be a very close proximate and contextual element worthy of first-hand analysis.

For example, magazine clippings of the days leading up to the first world war could be excellent primary sources when examining the social milieu at the time when the war began.

15. Photographs

Photographs capture an exact moment in history. Everything within the scene can give some first-hand context that we can learn from.

This primary data can be used when gathering information about the exact aftermath of an event, people’s guttural reactions (through examining facial expressions), and even the finer details of the interiors of a house. They could, similarly, reveal first-hand data about the fashion of a time.

16. Research Data

Raw research data, such as the raw data from a survey, scientific analysis, poll, or other quantitative studies, acts as a primary source.

Other examples include test results, protein and genetic sequences, audiotapes, questionnaires, and field notes.

This research data often needs to be interpreted by trained scientists and researchers. Sometimes, primary data is extremely difficult to interpret, which is why secondary sources are often necessary (i.e. sources that interpret, analyze, and present the primary data through their own studies and journalism).

17. Social Media Posts

Social media posts are some of the newest examples of primary sources that are coming back to bite people these days.

Politicians, actors, and public figures have their old social media posts scoured for embarrassing or offensive comments. These posts are presented as firm evidence of the opinions and behaviors of a person at a specific time in their lives.

18. Speeches

Famous speeches from history are regularly used as first-hand accounts of events. 

Speeches such as the Gettysburg address are transcribed and kept as the raw primary data. To this day, those speeches act as the closest accounts we can get to the exact words and thoughts of the person.

Today, a speech may be saved in audio or video form, making it an even more authoritative source.

19. Statistics

Statistics can provide objective data from a time and place. They can help us piece together history via a first-hand account taken at the time of the event.

For example, historical censuses allow us to not only know about the population data of a country at a certain time in history, but they allow us to map how fast populations have grown and make projections about population growth into the future.

One example of an early census is the Chinese census that took place in the year 2 CE. This census found that there were 57,671,400 individuals living in 12,366,470 households.

Another famous census was William the Conquerer’s census of 1086 in England, nicknamed the Doomesday Book . The purpose of this census was to determine how many people he could tax after taking over the country following the Battle of Hastings.

20. Studies and Reports

In the natural sciences, reports that deliver the findings of research data (including, most commonly, academic peer-reviewed journal articles ) are considered primary sources.

This is because the reports present findings of a first-hand study, rather than (for example) reviews of literature or syntheses of other people’s data.

Similarly, in journalism, an academic report will be considered primary data whereas a journalistic article discussing an academic report would be secondary. Therefore, journalists generally aim to find and read the original report (aka primary source) rather than citing other people who cite something.

21. Video recordings

Video of famous events can help reveal first-hand information about the event, much like photos.

An example of a video recording that can act as a primary source is CTV footage. This may be usable, for example, in the court of law, and can hold sway when convicting someone.

For videos and photographs, however, it’s important to think about what’s outside of the frame of the scene. Even a primary source needs to be examined critically.

Primary sources are generally believed to be more authoritative than secondary sources. However, they’re also very difficult to interpret, making secondary sources necessary.

Furthermore, different scholarly, academic, and journalistic traditions will have different ideas about what a primary source really is. As a result, some of the examples of primary sources in this list will not be suitable in all traditions.

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Primary Sources Essay Writing Guide. Where to Find Good Essay Sources?

• 🔑 What Do You Need to Know about Essay Sources
• 🔢 Examples of Primary, Secondary, & Tertiary Sources
• 🧱 Why Does Everyone Need Credible Sources?

5️⃣ Types of Primary Sources

• ✍️ How to Write a Primary Source Essay
• 🔎 Looking for Good Essay Sources? Check This

We will help you understand how to cite primary sources and write an excellent essay. Stay with us to find it out!

🔑 Essay Sources Explained

Once you’ve chosen the topic for your essay , you need to start thinking about writing it. A list of credible sources is what you are going to need in the first place.

So, we suggest you look into different types of academic sources existing out there!

6 Reasons to Make a List of Solid Sources in Your Essay

An essay is not exactly an academic genre. It’s not so strict-ruled and rigid. Still, the use of reliable and secure sources makes your piece wholesome.

Here are the reasons why it’s essential:

• Reliable sources back up your opinion. Readers tend to take your point of view if it’s well-grounded.
• A variety of literature provides you with other points, perspectives, and ideas: you are not alone in your opinion.
• Cited statements make your readers consider and discuss them as a part of the essay.
• Figures and data from credible sources add validity to your source essay.
• By reading all that literature , you make an impression of a researcher and analyst.
• Share the information with your readers so that they can read about the issues themselves.

Primary, Secondary, Tertiary Sources

There is an endless variety of information, both online and offline. How to find what you need? The answer is simple: you just need to know precisely what to search for.

Various sources can fit different purposes and types of works. Let’s dig deeper into their specification!

I. Primary Sources

A primary source is direct, original data designed for further study and analysis. Such sources provide firsthand, authentic information related to an event, phenomenon, or any other subject.

Examples of primary sources are:

• Literary works
• Artworks: drawings, sketches
• Interviews or speeches
• Original letters or manuscripts
• Authentic documents of legislation or government
• Photographs or video recordings

These materials serve as a fundamental base for diverse types of researches. Primary sources are of wide use in historical or literary analysis. Scientific studies and critical commentaries also need primary sources.

There’s a wide range of purposes for which various primary sources serve:

• For instance, opinion poll findings can be inserted into sociological research.
• Or let’s take documentary archives: they are essential for an excellent historical monography.
• For a good essay about a famous person, you will need their lifetime recordings and interviews.

II. Secondary Sources

Secondary sources are on the second level of the authenticity hierarchy. It means someone has already processed the data, analyzed, or critiqued it.

That doesn’t make secondary sources worse or less valid, though. Let’s have a closer look at the examples:

• Scholarly articles and books
• Any type of criticism ( literary, music, or cinematography critique )
• Commentaries and reviews
• Interpretations, analysis, and synthesis
• Famous people’s biographies
• Textbooks (may be tertiary)

Secondary sources are usually interpretive. They tend to analyze already existing information pieces. That’s why one can find them in all sorts of scholarly works, surveys, and articles.

• For example, original scientific articles excerpted from journals are suitable for the literature review.
• Critical analyses of Malevich’s Manifesto will fit into the art history dissertation.
• Marylin Monro’s biography can become a part of a famous 50-s actress encyclopedia, as well.

So, secondary sources are directly related to the primary sources – they use them.

III. Tertiary Sources

Tertiary sources can be defined as a compilation of both primary and secondary sources together. It includes a thorough summary of organized information and its background.

Look at the examples to grasp the idea:

• Handbooks & textbooks
• Biographies or compilation of them
• Dictionaries & encyclopedias
• Card indexes and catalogs

A tertiary source lets you get easy and fast access to a large amount of data. They are accommodating for extensive surveys and researches.

• Let’s take an essay on the abortion issue. You’re going to need figures and statistics from the birth rate data reports to write it.
• Another example is a scholarly work studying American poets of the late 40s. More likely, you’ll need a catalog with specific names, so you can understand what to search.
• Or, you’re studying psychiatry and are about to write a term paper on addictions affecting people’s lives. In that case, a guidebook on different types of addictions will be of great value for you.

🔢 Primary, Secondary, Tertiary… It’s All Relative

Any document or piece of information can be primary, secondary, or tertiary.

It depends on the way you treat it.

Your exact question and a research focus play a decisive role while identifying the sources.

Let’s get a more precise understanding of this with the help of some good examples.

🧱 Why Finding Credible Sources Is a Must?

We hope you are now more confident with primary, secondary, and tertiary sources.

Now let’s get to the rules of defining a list of credible sources.

It’s essential to be picky and attentive when it comes to source selection! Don’t fall upon any text you encounter online, especially if the website isn’t reliable enough.

How to Find Credible Sources?

We suggest you a checklist for recognizing the most valid sources:

• H-index: check out a publication’s authority according to the Hirsch index . It’s one of the most reliable ways to prove article validity.
• Make sure the domain is safe . Websites with suspicious domains tend to provide dubious information.
• Look for some extra information: if you find some relevant source, try to look for references in other sources.

Anyway, the best way to make your paper decent and solid is to double-check all the data you use. Take as a rule analyzing and reflecting upon everything you read.

Now you know the very fundamentals of working with the sources, it’s time to move on.

The following section is about the types of primary sources.

Are you excited enough to find out what types of primary sources exist there?

5 Common Types of Primary Sources

We offer a list of five types of primary sources that are used pretty often. However, there are many more primary sources out there to study.

Cultural products

• Items produced within the cultural development of humanity.
• Different pieces of art and media: paintings, statues, movie tapes, clothing, or jewelry.
• Such physical evidence evokes imagination and facilitates research capacity. They demand a very consistent approach and have to be treated carefully.

Accounts on people/events/ideas

• Sources that transfer memories about specific phenomena, people, or occasions.
• Such items as memoirs, newspapers, chronicles, diaries comprise this scope.
• These pieces are like time machines that can reconstruct the picture of the past quickly.

Demographic data

• The information about the population of a particular place or time.
• Demographic data includes birth and death records and censuses.
• It has great value because it lets a researcher survey phenomena and processes related to the population.

Organizations’ records

• These documents disclose the peculiarities of the work process of an institution.
• It can be various kinds of archives, databases, church registers.
• They preserve complex information about employees, transactions, contracts, and other factual data.

Places’ records

• These are tools containing broad information about geographical locations.
• Maps, atlases, travel guides, or photographs.
• They also contribute to a more vivid and detailed picture of the whole situation for the research. All this delivers facts about a definite place, which makes analysis precise and accurate.

✍️ Writing a Primary Source Essay

Is it time to write a primary source essay yet?

Let’s learn how to deal with the primary sources analysis essay in this section.

Keep on reading what we have prepared to master writing essays with reliable sources!

1. What Is a Primary Source Essay?

A primary source essay is writing where you widely and frequently cite primary sources. You have to reflect upon them, analyze, and use them as a foundation for your arguments. For example, it can be an analysis essay studying the logic of literary devices used in the Iliad.

Here are the examples we’ve prepared for you for a better understanding:

• Topic: “Analysis of Clyde Griffiths’ character in Theodore Dreiser’s American Tragedy.” Concept: Look for descriptions of Clyde’s character in the book first. Then cite these extracts in your essay while solidifying your opinion. Primary sources: The primary source which you are going to use is the novel itself.
• Topic: “Analysis of the reasons for low birth rate in Northern countries.” Concept: Get down to searching sociological articles dedicated to this issue. Find the information that reveals particular reasons and use it as supporting arguments. Primary sources: birth statistics, value surveys, and other data about economic and well-being factors.
• Topic: “The peculiarities of female writers’ acceptance in the 1950s.” Concept: There must be a lot of criticism written in those years. Search for the most exciting and worth citing pieces, draw the quotations to your writing. Primary sources: book reviews, interpretations, newspaper articles of that period
• Topic: “Analysis of major turning points of WWII.” Concept: You’ll have to look for the sources containing the information on the critical WWII events. Refer to the views of different authors to prove the event was significant. Primary sources: books of authoritative historians and memoirs of war participants.
• Topic: “How modern female singers are presented in online media”? Concept: Head for digital sources dedicated to famous people’s lives, find articles, pictures, and interviews. Primary sources: online magazines, journals, and articles.

2. Primary Source Analysis Essay: Writing Guide

You already understand how to use primary sources in your writing. It’s time to comprehend the whole process of writing a primary source essay format in detail.

Are you ready?

Working with the Source

To ensure that a source is reliable and meets all the demands, you should conduct preliminary analysis . Any piece of information and external factors are worth your attention here.

Use this checklist to make yourself sure about source credibility:

• Learn about the author of the source. Where do they come from, what are their characteristics – social and demographic?
• Analyze the way the author tries to deliver the message: the style, language, tone. Does it have signs of prejudice or bias? Does the narrative show the author’s full awareness of the issue?
• Evaluate and describe the context of the document or whatever the source is.
• Try to find out the exact circumstances and time when the source first appeared.

Introducing the Key Ideas

Are you most likely to have a keen desire to sound persuasive to the audience? Let the readers comprehend the primary focus of research. Give a brief description of the main idea, state a thesis and your opinion before going into details.

Analyzing the Meaning

We have approached the central and the most supplemented part of the essay – its body.

It’s time to go all-in now.

In the central part of the analysis, you should use meticulous details and a thorough description of the essence.

Observe the fundamental points:

• You aim to prove the significance of the source for the work. Show the value the document or object carries and what questions it answers.
• Are there other viewpoints on the subject in question? Analyze different approaches and interpretations as well.
• Also, consider the points where this source isn’t helpful: answers on which questions it fails to give?

Concluding the Analysis

It’s the right moment to wind up with your primary source essay.

The process doesn’t differ much from that of any other type of essay. The peculiarities of the conclusion may vary depending on the research question.

• Comprise and sum up all your ideas and thoughts.
• Draw a consistent summary based on everything you’ve discussed in your writing.
• Repeat the value and novelty of using your primary sources one more time.

3. How to Cite a Primary Source?

The final step is to cite primary sources properly. There can be a great variety of them. For instance, you may have to cite primary sources from a book or website.

It may happen that you’ll have to cite sources both inside the text and in the bibliography list:

We’ll give you examples of how to cite a book or refer to a picture you use in the text.

How to Cite Primary Sources in Text

The citation appears right in the text.

How to Cite Primary Sources in Bibliography

Let’s see how to cite a source in the bibliography list now.

🔎 Where to Find Good Essay Sources?

If you are at this point, you know how to write an excellent primary source analysis essay. You definitely got an idea of how to cite primary sources for it.

It’s a good deal of work!

Now you wonder where to find good sources, do you?

No worries, we’ve prepared a list of reliable and trustworthy websites for you:

Academic Sources: Search Engines and Individual Publishers

Scholar.google.com Directory of Open Access Journals Aosis Open Journals Taylor & Francis Copernicus Publications F1000Research Highwire free online full-text articles Hindawi Publishing Corporation Open Book Publishers Open Edition PeerJ Public Library of Science Sage The Company of Biologists

University Libraries with Open Access Policies

MIT Libraries Harvard Library Databases Yale Digital Collections Center University of Hawaii Library Columbia University Libraries

Open Access to Academic Sources – Full-Text Articles

Dovepress Academic Journals Open Library (JSTOR’s project) National Agricultural Library AGRIS Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations Arachne (Archaeology, Art History database) Arnetminer (Computer Science database) arXiv Cornell University Library

Hopefully, you’ll have no problem accessing the academic sources you need.

And that takes us to the final checklist. Go through this list and figure your strong and weak sides.

• You clearly understand the differences between primary, secondary, and tertiary sources. You know when to use each of them.
• You know how to detect credible sources, where to find them, and how to evaluate them.
• You exactly know which type of primary sources you need for your essay topic.
• You’ve conducted a preliminary analysis with these sources and gathered the basic info about the author, date, and place of creation, as well as analyzed discussion, critique, etc.
• You’ve sufficiently applied the data from the primary sources in your essay.
• You’ve followed all rules of citing primary sources: they are cited correctly both in text and bibliography.

We wish you lots of inspiration and good luck 🍀

Research Paper Analysis: How to Analyze a Research Article + Example

Film analysis: example, format, and outline + topics & prompts.

How to Write a Primary Source Analysis

Maria magher.

Primary sources are the most important tools for research in any field. In the humanities, primary sources might include works of literature, journals or letters. Newspaper articles, journals and telegraphs might be primary sources for historical study. The sciences might look at original studies. Analyzing these sources can provide a starting point for one's own research, helping to situate it within a historical context, identify areas for needed research or to support a thesis.

Research the author and learn everything you can about his background and potential bias. Even if a primary source was not written with an agenda in mind, an author's upbringing, education, social status, religion and other biographical details can all influence the ideas being presented in the source. For example, knowing that an author was exceptionally wealthy may undermine the argument put forth in a treatise dismissing the plight of the poor. By learning everything you can about the author, you can identify potential biases.

Consider the author's relationship to the material. For example, a letter or article that is describing the details of a battle is considered much more reliable if it was written by a person who saw the events firsthand. A letter or article describing something that someone else related may not be as reliable. An exception may be made for newspaper articles that traditionally rely on interviews with witnesses to produce the report.

Learn the intended audience for the piece. A private journal entry may be considered more reliable in some cases because the author was only writing for himself and had no reason to shape the information to elicit a certain response. An article that was written for a special interest group may be considered less reliable since it might be written to appeal to the biases of that group. Knowing the audience can help you determine any bias or ulterior motive in the source material.

Place the source in historical context. A letter that argues for the legalization of same-sex marriage may not be considered shocking if it was written in 2014. However, that same letter written in 1814 would be considered radical in almost any society. You must put the source in context of historical events and cultural mores. You should also identify any events that might have influenced the writing of the material, such as an essay written in response to economic changes after a war. You should also identify the influence that the source material had, if any. While a work may seem provocative, your research may show that there was no cultural response at the time of its publication.

Analyze the intent of the material. Determine if the source was written to simply provide a record of events, such as a newspaper article or historical account, or whether it was written to interpret or analyze events to put forth an argument. If the author intended to advance an argument with the material, that will change the way you evaluate the source, including whether the argument was successful and what biases are contained in it.

Inspect the physical document if it is available. You can learn a lot of information from the clues you find there. For example, if a letter is found to have water damage, it could mean that the author cried while writing it. If a letter is written on expensive paper, it could be evidence of wealth. These clues can provide more information about the author, the historical context or even the intent of the writing. Inspecting the physical document can also help you to determine its authenticity. If you can't access the original document, use other tools at your disposal to determine the authenticity of the writing, such as other historical and biographical research.

Create a thesis statement for your analysis. Once you have all the information you can gather about your primary source, you must create a strong statement that unifies your analysis. For example, your thesis may be that the writing caused a great deal of social upset at the time it was published but that it failed to have any lasting historical value. Your thesis will be determined by your research.

Answer these questions about your source in the analysis. Be as thorough as you can be. You may not have arrived at a clear answer for all questions about your source, but you should be thorough in explaining what you did uncover. Don't just provide historical and biographical details. Provide context and interpret your results, showing what influence or importance the information has.

Provide supporting details. If you were able to access an original document, provide a photocopy of it. Include a works cited page that includes your primary source and any secondary sources you used to research it, such as biographies, historical accounts and other research into the material.

• 1 Western Michigan University: Robert F. Berkhofer, Department of History: Writing a Source-Analysis Paper: The Ten-Step Process

About the Author

Maria Magher has been working as a professional writer since 2001. She has worked as an ESL teacher, a freshman composition teacher and an education reporter, writing for regional newspapers and online publications. She has written about parenting for Pampers and other websites. She has a Master's degree in English and creative writing.

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Crafting a Comprehensive Bibliography: Key Principles and Best Practices

This essay is about the essential principles and best practices for creating a comprehensive bibliography. It emphasizes the importance of a bibliography in academic writing for ensuring transparency and giving credit to original authors. The essay outlines the need to adhere to specific citation styles, such as APA, MLA, Chicago, and Harvard, and stresses the significance of meticulous note-taking and organized documentation. It discusses the correct ordering of entries, attention to detail in formatting, and the potential value of annotated bibliographies. Additionally, the essay highlights the usefulness of citation management tools while cautioning against relying solely on them without manual verification. Ultimately, it underscores the importance of a well-constructed bibliography in enhancing the credibility of scholarly work.

How it works

A well-structured bibliography shows off the scope of your research and provides readers with a guide to help them find the original sources. It is a crucial part of writing for academic purposes. A bibliography is a crucial part of scholarly writing that goes beyond simple adherence to guidelines. It ensures that the original authors are given due credit and displays the variety of books you have studied. This essay examines the principles and suggested procedures for gathering a thorough bibliography, highlighting the significance of this kind of work and the laborious process required to achieve precision and consistency.

Priority one should be given to comprehending the function of a bibliography. It is a comprehensive inventory of all the materials—books, journal articles, webpages, and other media—that helped shape your work. By listing these sources, you provide your readers with transparency and enable them to check the facts and delve deeper into the subject. Additionally, by explicitly identifying the sources of your ideas and data, a well-written bibliography helps you avoid plagiarism.

Following the particular citation style specified by your academic institution or publication is one of the most important things to keep in mind while creating a bibliography. Common styles have different formats and guidelines, such as APA, MLA, Chicago, and Harvard. It is important to familiarize oneself with the rules of the selected style. For example, MLA emphasizes author-page number citations, but APA style usually stresses the author-date format. Applying these rules consistently is essential to preserving the caliber of your work as a professional.

The first step in creating a bibliography is taking thorough notes. It is essential that you take note of every pertinent data from each source while you conduct your research. These specifics typically consist of the name of the author, the work’s title, the publisher, the publication date, and, in the case of journal articles, the volume and issue numbers. Extra details are needed for digital sources, like the URL and the access date. Having well-organized notes will make producing a bibliography easier and less likely to leave out important details.

The arrangement of the things in your bibliography is a crucial factor to take into account. The majority of reference styles mandate that sources be arranged alphabetically by last name of the author. An author’s citations in several books should be listed chronologically in the entries. The pieces are sorted alphabetically by the work’s title if the author is unknown. It is simple for readers to look through the list and locate particular sources thanks to this methodical approach.

A superb bibliography is one that meticulously considers every aspect. This means accurately transcribing material and using the proper format and punctuation. For example, book and journal titles are typically italicized or emphasized, but article titles are surrounded by quote marks. According to the rules, all parts of a citation, such as the author’s name, title, and publishing details, must be punctuated correctly. Careful proofreading is essential since even the smallest errors can undermine the trustworthiness of your work.

It can be helpful to provide an annotation in addition to a list of sources in your bibliography. An annotated bibliography consists of summaries or evaluations of the references. These comments, which describe the accuracy, dependability, and quality of each source, can assist readers understand the context and significance of your references. Even though it requires more time to complete, an annotated bibliography demonstrates a deeper engagement with the material and can enhance the overall impact of your research.

Technology is a useful tool for compiling a bibliography. To assist with organizing and formatting your references, there are a variety of citation management programs available, including Mendeley, EndNote, and Zotero. These applications can organize your sources, create citations automatically in a variety of styles, and work flawlessly with word processing programs. It is not suggested to rely exclusively on these tools, though, as manual verification is still required to guarantee accuracy and adherence to particular formatting guidelines.

In summary, creating an extensive bibliography highlights the scientific rigor of your work and is a laborious but worthwhile procedure. It necessitates paying close attention to specifics, following citation guidelines, and arranging and recording sources in an orderly manner. By devoting the necessary time and energy to producing a precise and organized bibliography, you enhance the authority of your study and add to the body of knowledge within the academic community. Whether you are an experienced researcher or a rookie scholar, learning the craft of producing a bibliography is a crucial ability that will benefit you in both your academic and professional endeavors.

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Indigenous Studies

• Background Sources
• Scholarly Articles & Databases

Primary Sources

Subcollections in primary source databases, digital collections, modern news sources, leni-lenape primary sources: colonial narratives, leni-lenape primary sources: oral histories.

• Research and Writing Resources
• Lenni-Lenape Resources

In humanities disciplines like history and literature, a primary source is an item produced from the time you are researching (e.g., photographs, a letters, newspaper articles, government documents).  Looking at actual sources from a specific time helps you get a firsthand account of what was happening then.

In the sciences and social sciences, research data and original research studies are also considered primary sources.

Secondary sources provide analysis of primary sources (e.g., scholarly articles and books).

(Rowan login required)

• History Vault: American Indians and the American West, 1809-1971) (Primary Sources - Proquest) Collections from the U.S. National Archives and the Chicago History Museum, as well as first-hand accounts on Indian Wars and westward migration
• Indian Claims Insight (Primary Sources - Proquest) Legal histories and documents related to Indian claims and compiled histories for Indian Nation/Tribes
• Native Americans in History: Part I: Newspaper, 1728-1922 (Accessible Archives)
• Native Americans in History: Part II: Books, 1663-1928 (Accessible Archives)
• North American Indian Thought and Culture (Primary Sources - Proquest) Primary source materials representing historical moments as experienced by those who lived through them
• North American Indian Drama (Primary Sources - Proquest) Plays by 48 American Indian and First Nation playwrights from the twentieth century. Over half of these works are rare or previously unpublished.
• Indigenous Newspapers in North America (AM Explorer) Two centuries of indigenous print journalism from the US and Canada
• Indigenous Histories and Cultures in North America(AM Explorer) Primary source materials dating from the earliest contact with European settlers to the mid-twentieth century
• Empire Online This link opens in a new window Primary source materials in world history. more... less... This resource brings together manuscript, printed and visual primary source materials for the study of 'Empire' and its theories, practices and consequences. The materials span across the last five centuries and are accompanied by a host of secondary learning resources including scholarly essays, maps and an interactive chronology.
• Ethnic NewsWatch This link opens in a new window News, magazine, and journal articles from the ethnic, minority and native press. more... less... An interdisciplinary, bilingual (English and Spanish) comprehensive full text database of the newspapers, magazines and journals of the ethnic, minority and native press. Coverage begins in 1990.
• HeinOnline This link opens in a new window Comprehensive coverage of more than 2,000 journals and the Congressional Record. more... less... Complete coverage of the U.S. Reports back to 1754, constitutions for every country in the world, classic books from the 18th & 19th centuries, all United States Treaties, the Federal Register and CFR from inception.
• American Indians of the Pacific Northwest Collection Photographs, documents, and maps about the Northwest Coast and Plateau Indian cultures and related essays by anthropologists, histories, and teachers. From the University of Washington.
• Archives Library Information Center: Native Americans (National Archives) Includes digital collections, genealogical resources, laws and treaties, and more.
• Association on American Indian Affairs Records, 1851-2016 (mostly 1922-1995) Physical and digitized materials available from Princeton University. Select "Only show materials containing online content" to limit to digitized materials.
• Chief George Manuel Memorial Indigenous Library Contains documents, reports, and publications from indigenous nations in North America and the world. Established in 1979 as a document repository, in response to a resolution of the Conference of Tribal Governments.
• Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers - Indians of North America A project of the National Endowmen for the Humanities and the Library of Congress.
• Duke Collection of American Indian Oral History Typescripts of interviews from 1967-1972 with Native Americans in Oklahoma
• Early Americas Digital Archive Texts written in or about the Americas from 1492 to 1820
• First Nations Collection, Southern Oregon Digital Archives Documents, books, and artilces on the indigenous people of the region.
• Images of North Americans Illustrations from rare books, magazines, newspapers, an ephemera; photographs; and other visual materials. Materials reflect European interpretations of Native Americans. From the University of California - Berkeley.
• Indigenous Studies Portal Research Tool (University of Saskatchewan) A database of full text primary and secondary sources focused primarily on Indigenous peoples of Canada and secondarily on North American materials.
• Library of Congress "American Indians" subject search
• Library of Congress: "Native Americans" subject search
• Native American and Indigenous History and Culture, Smithsonian Institute Selected collections.
• Native American Heritage Month: Exhilbitions and Collections Featured archival materials from the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian Institute, and more.
• Native Voices: Native Peoples' Concepts of Health and Illness Includes exhibition materials, inteviews, and an historical timeline. From the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
• Oklahoma State University Library Digital Collections Many of OSU's digital collections concentrate on Native American history. Search the collections using terms like 'Native American.' (Note: Many of the Lenape people indigenous to New Jersey relocated to Oklahoma.)
• The Trail of Tears through Arkansas Eyewitness accounts, letters, removal claim documents, and background information about the Trail of Tears through Arkansas. From the University of Arkansas - Little Rock.
• Treaties between the United States and Native Americans (The Avalon Project) From Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.
• Tribal Treaties Database (Oklahoma State Univeristy Libraries) Includes agreements between tribal nations and the United States (1778-1886). A project of Oklahoma State University Library, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Department of the Interior.
• Tribal Writers Digital Library (Sequoyah National Research Center) Features out-of-print literary works of American Indians, Alaska natives, and First Nations people of Canada
• Indian Country Today An independent news source and public media broadcast serving Indigenous communities
• Indian Country (Al Jazeera)
• Native News Online

• Geographia Americae : with an account of the Delaware Indians : based on surveys and notes made in 1654-1656 by Peter Lindestrom Call Number: Special Collections F167 .L73 Publication Date: 1925

Oral histories are important sources of history and narrative in many Native American cultures and traditions. These examples bring to the forefront Indigenous perspectives and traditions.

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• Last Updated: Jul 1, 2024 11:36 AM
• URL: https://libguides.rowan.edu/indigenous_studies

We Need to Control AI Agents Now

Automated bots are about to be everywhere, with potentially devastating consequences.

Listen to this article

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

In 2010—well before the rise of ChatGPT and Claude and all the other sprightly, conversational AI models—an army of bots briefly wiped out $1 trillion of value across the NASDAQ and other stock exchanges. Lengthy investigations were undertaken to figure out what had happened and why—and how to prevent it from happening again. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s report on the matter blamed high-frequency-trading algorithms unexpectedly engaging in a mindless “hot potato” buying and selling of contracts back and forth to one another.

A “flash crash,” as the incident was called, may seem quaint relative to what lies ahead. That’s because, even amid all the AI hype, a looming part of the AI revolution is under-examined: “agents.” Agents are AIs that act independently on behalf of humans. As the 2010 flash crash showed, automated bots have been in use for years. But large language models can now translate plain-language goals, expressed by anyone, into concrete instructions that are interpretable and executable by a computer—not just in a narrow, specialized realm such as securities trading, but across the digital and physical worlds at large. Such agents are hard to understand, evaluate, or counter, and once set loose, they could operate indefinitely.

For all of today’s concern about AI safety , including potentially existential risks , there’s been no particular general alarm or corresponding regulation around these emerging AI agents. There have been thought experiments about an AI given (or setting for itself) an arbitrary and seemingly harmless goal, such as to manufacture as many paper clips as possible, only to cause disaster when it diverts all of humanity’s resources toward that goal. But well short of having to confront a speculative monomaniacal superintelligence, we must attend to more pressing if prosaic problems, caused by decidedly nonspeculative contemporary agents. These can mess up, either through the malice of those who get them going, or accidentally, monkey’s-paw style, when commissioned with a few ill-chosen words. For example, Air Canada recently experienced the latter when it set up a chatbot for customer assistance with a prompt to be helpful, along with access to the Air Canada website for use in answering customer questions. The bot helpfully explained a policy on bereavement fares in a way far more generous than the airline’s actual policy. Air Canada tried to repudiate the bot’s promises, and failed : A tribunal held that the customer was owed compensation.

Read: This is what it looks like when AI eats the world

Today’s agents add up to more than a typical chatbot, with three distinct qualities. First, they can be given a high-level, even vague goal and independently take steps to bring it about, through research or work of their own. The idea is simple but powerful. For example, a year ago, an enterprising techie developed an AI that could order a pizza for him. He relied on software tools developed by companies such as OpenAI to create a “top-level AI” that could charter and command other AIs. That top-level AI was provided a goal—order a pepperoni pizza by voice from a given phone number—and then it went on to create its own task list and develop different versions of itself to perform those tasks, including prioritizing different steps in the list and producing a version of itself that was able to use a text-to-voice converter to make the phone call. Thus the AI was able to find and call a local pizzeria and place the order.

That demonstrates a second quality of agents beyond planning to meet a goal: They can interact with the world at large, using different software tools at will, as you might when opening Excel or placing a DoorDash order while also browsing the web. With the invitation and blessing of companies such as OpenAI, generative-AI models can take in information from the outside world and, in turn, affect it. As OpenAI says , you can “connect GPTs to databases, plug them into emails, or make them your shopping assistant. For example, you could integrate a travel listings database, connect a user’s email inbox, or facilitate e-commerce orders.” Agents could also accept and spend money.

This routinization of AI that doesn’t simply talk with us, but also acts out in the world, is a crossing of the blood-brain barrier between digital and analog, bits and atoms. That should give us pause.

A non-AI example jumps to mind as a nefarious road map for what may lie ahead. Last year, a man left a bag conspicuously containing wires and a lockbox outside Harvard Yard. Harvard police then received a call with a disguised voice warning that it was one of three bombs on campus, and that they’d all go off soon unless the university transferred money to a hard-to-trace cryptocurrency address. The bag was determined to be harmless. The threat was a hoax.

When police identified and arrested the man who left the bag, it turned out that he had answered a Craigslist ad offering money for him to assemble and bring those items to campus. The person behind that ad—and the threatening calls to Harvard—was never found. The man who placed the wires pleaded guilty only to hiding out and deleting some potentially incriminating text messages and was sentenced to probation, after the authorities credited that he was not the originator of the plot. He didn’t know that he’d joined a conspiracy to commit extortion.

Read: Welcome to a world without endings

This particular event may not have involved AI, but it’s easy to imagine that an AI agent could soon be used to goad a person into following each of the steps in the Harvard extortion case, with a minimum of prompting and guidance. More worrying, such threats can easily scale far beyond what a single malicious person could manage alone; imagine whoever was behind the Harvard plot being able to enact it in hundreds or thousands of towns, all at once. The act doesn’t have to be as dramatic as a bomb threat. It could just be something like keeping an eye out for a particular person joining social media or job sites and to immediately and tirelessly post replies and reviews disparaging them.

This lays bare the third quality of AI agents: They can operate indefinitely, allowing human operators to “set it and forget it.” Agents might be hand-coded, or powered by companies who offer services the way that cemeteries offer perpetual care for graves, or that banks offer to steward someone’s money for decades at a time. Or the agents might even run on anonymous computing resources distributed among thousands of computers whose owners are, by design, ignorant of what’s running—while being paid for their computing power.

The problem here is that the AI may continue to operate well beyond any initial usefulness. There’s simply no way to know what moldering agents might stick around as circumstances change. With no framework for how to identify what they are, who set them up, and how and under what authority to turn them off, agents may end up like space junk : satellites lobbed into orbit and then forgotten. There is the potential for not only one-off collisions with active satellites, but also a chain reaction of collisions : The fragments of one collision create further collisions, and so on, creating a possibly impassable gauntlet of shrapnel blocking future spacecraft launches.

Read: The big AI risk not enough people are seeing

If agents take off, they may end up operating in a world quite different from the one that first wound them up—after all, it’ll be a world with a lot of agents in it. They could start to interact with one another in unanticipated ways, just as they did in the 2010 flash crash. In that case, the bots had been created by humans but simply acted in strange ways during unanticipated circumstances. Here, agents set to translate vague goals might also choose the wrong means to achieve them: A student who asks a bot to “help me cope with this boring class” might unwittingly generate a phoned-in bomb threat as the AI attempts to spice things up. This is an example of a larger phenomenon known as reward hacking , where AI models and systems can respond to certain incentives or optimize for certain goals while lacking crucial context, capturing the letter but not the spirit of the goal.

Even without collisions, imagine a fleet of pro–Vladimir Putin agents playing a long game by joining hobbyist forums, earnestly discussing those hobbies, and then waiting for a seemingly organic, opportune moment to work in favored political talking points. Or an agent might be commissioned to set up, advertise, and deliver on an offered bounty for someone’s private information, whenever and wherever it might appear. An agent can deliver years later on an impulsive grudge—revenge is said to be a dish best served cold, and here it could be cryogenically frozen.

Much of this account remains speculative. Agents have not experienced a public boom yet, and by their very nature it’s hard to know how they’ll be used, or what protections the companies that help offer them will implement. Agentics, like much of the rest of modern technology, may have two phases: too early to tell, and too late to do anything about it.

In these circumstances, we should look for low-cost interventions that are comparatively easy to agree on and that won’t be burdensome. Yale Law School’s Ian Ayres and Jack Balkin are among the legal scholars beginning to wrestle with how we might best categorize AI agents and consider their behavior. That would have been helpful in the Air Canada case around a bot’s inaccurate advice to a customer, where the tribunal hearing the claim was skeptical of what it took to be the airline’s argument that “the chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions.” And it’s particularly important to evaluate agent-driven acts whose character depends on assessing the actor’s intentions. Suppose the agent waiting to pounce on a victim’s social-media posts doesn’t just disparage the person, but threatens them. Ayres and Balkin point out that the Supreme Court recently held that criminalizing true threats requires that the person making the threats subjectively understand that they’re inspiring fear. Some different legal approach will be required to respond up and down the AI supply chain when unthinking agents are making threats.

Technical interventions can help with whatever legal distinctions emerge. Last year, OpenAI researchers published a thoughtful paper chronicling some agentic hazards. There they broached the possibility that servers running AI bots should have to be identified, and others have made efforts to describe how that might work .

Read: It’s the end of the web as we know it

But we might also look to refining existing internet standards to help manage this situation. Data are already distributed online through “packets,” which are labeled with network addresses of senders and receivers. These labels can typically be read by anyone along the packets’ route, even if the information itself is encrypted. There ought to be a new, special blank on a packet’s digital form to indicate that a packet has been generated by a bot or an agent, and perhaps a place to indicate something about when it was created and by whom—just like a license plate can be used to track down a car’s owner without revealing their identity to bystanders.

To allow such labels within Internet Protocol would give software designers and users a chance to choose to use them, and it would allow the companies behind, say, the DoorDash and Domino’s apps to decide whether they want to treat an order for 20 pizzas from a human differently from one placed by a bot. Although any such system could be circumvented, regulators could help encourage adoption. For example, designers and providers of agents could be offered a cap on damages for the harm their agents cause if they decide to label their agents’ online activities.

Internet routing offers a further lesson. There is no master map of the internet because it was designed for anyone to join it, not by going through a central switchboard, but by connecting to anyone already online. The resulting network is one that relies on routers—way stations—that can communicate with one another about what they see as near and what they see as far. Thus can a packet be passed along, router to router, until it reaches its destination. That does, however, leave open the prospect that a packet could end up in its own form of eternal orbit , being passed among routers forever, through mistake or bad intention. That’s why most packets have a “ time to live ,” a number that helps show how many times they’ve hopped from one router to another. The counter might start at, say, 64, and then go down by one for each router the packet passes. It dies at zero, even if it hasn’t reached its destination.

Read: What to do about the junkification of the internet

Agents, too, could and should have a standardized way of winding down: so many actions, or so much time, or so much impact, as befits their original purpose. Perhaps agents designed to last forever or have a big impact could be given more scrutiny and review—or be required to have a license plate—while more modest ones don’t, the way bicycles and scooters don’t need license plates even as cars do, and tractor trailers need even more paperwork. These interventions focus less on what AI models are innately capable of in the lab, and more on what makes agentic AI different: They act in the real world, even as their behavior is represented on the network.

It is too easy for the blinding pace of modern tech to make us think that we must choose between free markets and heavy-handed regulation—innovation versus stagnation. That’s not true. The right kind of standard-setting and regulatory touch can make new tech safe enough for general adoption—including by allowing market players to be more discerning about how they interact with one another and with their customers.

“Too early to tell” is, in this context, a good time to take stock, and to maintain our agency in a deep sense. We need to stay in the driver’s seat rather than be escorted by an invisible chauffeur acting on its own inscrutable and evolving motivations, or on those of a human distant in time and space.

This essay is adapted from Jonathan Zittrain’s forthcoming book on humanity both gaining power and losing control.

HOW TO CABIN THE REALIST INDETERMINACY THESIS: ON GREEN, POSITIVISM, AND THE SOURCES OF LAW

To appear in a collection of essays on the philosophy of Leslie Green, edited by T. Adams, K. Greasley, and D. Reaume (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)

21 Pages Posted:

Brian Leiter

University of Chicago

Date Written: July 01, 2024

Leslie Green raised an important challenge to my reconstruction of the American Legal Realist (ALR) arguments for the indeterminacy of law and legal reasoning:  how can those arguments be limited, as I claim, to mostly appellate cases?  The key, I argue, is to recognize that (1) the central ALR argument for indeterminacy appeals to the existence of equally "legitimate" but conflicting ways of interpreting valid sources of law, and (2) the relevant notion of "legitimacy" is sociological (i.e., what is actually accepted by lawyers and judges).  The ALR argument for indeterminacy being most apparent at the appellate level is then an empirical claim, which the ALRs supported with extensive evidence in many areas of law.  I also consider Green's suggestion that ALR takes most sources to be "permissive sources" (in Hart's sense), and criticize some misunderstandings of both ALR and Scandinavian Realism. 

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NEET PG 2024 papers to be prepared 2 hours prior; date to be announced this week: Sources

Neet pg 2024 will be held this month. the exam papers will be prepared two hours earlier, sources told news9.

NEET PG 2024: The National Eligibility Entrance Test (NEET) PG 2024 exam papers will be prepared two hours earlier, sources told News9 . The Home Ministry met officials from the government’s anti-cybercrime body today and decided to conduct NEET PG this month. The NEET PG date will be announced this week.

NEET PG was was earlier scheduled to be held on June 23 but cancelled as a pre-emptive measure following allegations of irregularities in entrance exams. Over 2 lakh students applied to appear for NEET PG this year, the paper comprises 200 multiple-choice questions (MCQ). NEET PG will be held in a computer-based test (CBT) format, the duration of the paper is 3 hours and 30 minutes.

NEET PG paper will be held on subjects- Anatomy, Physiology, Biochemistry, Pathology, Pharmacology, Microbiology, Forensic Medicine, Social and Preventive Medicine, General Medicine, General Surgery, Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Pediatrics, ENT, Ophthalmology.

The NEET PG hall ticket will be released three to four days before exam. NEET PG admit card will be available online on the website- natboard.edu.in, nmc.org . To download NEET PG hall ticket, candidates need to visit official website- natboard.edu.in, nmc.org. Click on NEET PG hall ticket link. Enter log-in credentials- application number, date of birth. NEET PG hall ticket 2024 pdf will be available for download. Save NEET PG admit card pdf and take a print out for further reference.

NTA has already announced revised dates UGC NET, CSIR UGC NET, NCET. UGC NET is scheduled to be held between August 21 and September 4, Joint CSIR-UGC NET- July 25 to 27, NCET- July 10.

For details on NEET PG, please visit the official website- natboard.edu.in, nmc.org .

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NEET PG exam in August, question paper to be finalised hours prior: Sources

A significant meeting was recently held in the i4c wing of the home ministry concerning the neet pg exam. this meeting, involving officials from the cyber cell, was crucial in the lead-up to the announcement of the exam date..

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• NEET PG exam questions will be finalised hours before the exam for security
• Government agencies are identifying and addressing potential loopholes
• NEET PG exam date to be announced soon; exams likely in August

A significant meeting was held in the I4C wing of the Home Ministry with Cyber Cell officials to discuss the NEET PG exam. The question paper will be prepared just a few hours before the exam to ensure security. Various government agencies are evaluating potential loopholes, and the investigation is nearly complete. The exam date will be announced soon, with the exam likely to be conducted within a month.

The revised date for the NEET PG exam is expected to be announced by the end of this week, with the exams likely to be conducted in August.

The exam conducting process has been entrusted to an Expert Panel headed by Dr Radhakrishnan, a former ISRO official. The National Board of Examinations (NBE), responsible for conducting NEET PG, is currently awaiting approval from this review panel before finalising the new dates.

KEY UPDATES ON NEET PG EXAM 2024

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How well do online job postings match national sources in large English speaking countries?

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This paper presents the first international assessment of the Lightcast vacancy data representativeness based on benchmarking against officially reported vacancy data in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. The analysis compares distributions in the Lightcast data versus official data across large (TL2) regions, industrial sectors and occupational categories. The analysis shows differences in representativeness across countries and on the three dimensions considered. In general, regional representativeness is considerably better than both occupational and sectoral representativeness.

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