Secondary and Tertiary Sources

Most of the research you conduct for college assignments is secondary research. This means you are primarily seeking out sources about a topic, particularly those written by experts on the subject matter. The goal is to consult the existing body of knowledge and synthesize what others have discovered and analyzed through their research.

Except in a few specific circumstances, very few college assignments require the use of primary research, where you generate original data yourself through methods like experiments, surveys, interviews, or observations. Even when some primary sources are incorporated, such as historical documents, works of literature, or datasets, they are almost always analyzed and interpreted through the lens of secondary sources written by subject matter experts. You can read more about the distinction between primary and secondary sources, as well as how to locate, evaluate, and incorporate different source types, in the chapter on “Writing an Empirical Research Report.” That chapter provides in-depth guidance on conducting original primary research for academic papers. For most college research assignments, however, the emphasis will be on critically reviewing the secondary sources – consulting the work of experts who have already studied your topic in depth. Your task is to synthesize what they have found and contribute your own analysis and insights, rather than generating entirely new primary data yourself.

Secondary sources critically examine primary materials, put them into context, identify their significance, and situate them within broader theories and fields of study. Examples of secondary sources include scholarly books, peer-reviewed journal articles, literature reviews, critiques, commentaries, and analytical reports. These sources digest primary information and provide value-added analysis, evaluation, and interpretation.

Reference works, like dictionaries and encyclopedias, are considered tertiary sources because they synthesize and summarize information from other sources to provide basic background information. You may use reference works, particularly as you’re developing a sense of your topic and refining your ideas, but they rarely play a major supporting role in an academic essay. When they are cited, it’s almost always to provide basic background information when introducing the topic.

Searching Your College Library Catalog

With so many materials available with a simple Google search, using your college library catalog might seem unnecessary, but it should always be your first stop for locating sources. The library has many benefits that aren’t available to you when you search on your own, including:

• Access to subscription-only materials, including the full text of books and articles that you can access online
• Ability to request materials from other libraries at no charge
• Collections of sources that have already been vetted
• Focus on nonfiction and academic sources that are specific to student needs and interests
• Built-in tools to save, organize, and even cite your sources
• Actual humans who are there to help you do research

Not only is using the library a great way to save time and money, when your professors see that you are citing books and articles that clearly came from a college library rather than from a basic Internet search, they see that you understand the expectations of conducting academic research. Conversely, when your professors see that you have cited nothing but a few websites, they might question your academic maturity.

College libraries are designed to serve students, and they also have staff members who are experts in finding sources and who are there specifically to help you. Your college fees pay for those privileges, so use them!

How to Search a Library Catalog

Library catalogs work a little bit differently than internet search engines. They are not designed to parse full phrases or sentences as effectively, and rely more on precise “keyword” searches. You may need to experiment with different keyword combinations before finding the right terms to retrieve the most relevant results for your research topic.

You’ll probably want to use the advanced search options in the library catalog, unless your topic is still quite broad. The advanced search allows you to enter multiple search terms simultaneously and combine them using Boolean operators like AND, OR, and NOT to refine and narrow your search in various logical ways. Using “AND” allows you to search two or more keywords at once, narrowing down the search, while “NOT” allows you to exclude irrelevant materials that might be cluttering your research results. You would use “OR” to search variations or synonyms of the same term, which can be particularly useful when you’re not yet sure which term is most commonly used.

Be sure to take your time exploring and experimenting with the various search filters and limiters offered by the library catalog system. These can help further focus your results by criteria like publication date, language, material type, and more.

When you do find particularly relevant sources in the catalog that line up well with your research interests, take note of the “subject headings” or “subject terms” that the library has assigned to those sources. These standardized terms can provide an effective path for uncovering additional sources on the same concept. Using these subject terms as keywords in your subsequent searches, especially if your initial searches aren’t retrieving many useful results, can greatly improve your search strategy. The catalog subject headings essentially represent a controlled vocabulary of terms that the library uses to categorize and group related materials together. Leveraging this vocabulary can tap into the full depth of resources the library has on your topic area.

It would be impossible to fully explain every tool available to you; the best way to learn is through experimentation, so don’t be afraid to get in there and test it out.

What You’ll Find in the Library Catalog

The library catalog contains not only information about all of the physical items that are held in the library, but also information and links to the vast majority of the library’s digital items, meaning that in many cases, you can find and read your sources without ever leaving home.

Physical Items

• Books
• Print journals and magazines
• Newspapers
• DVDs and CDs
• Other multimedia materials

Online Databases

• Electronic journals and ebooks
• Newspapers and magazines in digital format
• Streaming videos and audio
• Primary source materials (historical documents, datasets, etc.)
• Subject-specific research databases (e.g. legal, medical, scientific)

The online databases provide access to a vast array of scholarly resources, both owned by the library and subscribed to from third-party providers. Many allow full-text searching and downloading of journal articles, ebooks, reports and more. The library typically organizes databases by broad disciplinary categories as well as specific subject areas to aid in discovery. With excellent search tools, the online databases exponentially expand the materials available beyond just the library’s physical collections.

A Pete’s Portal search will search all of these materials at once, and if you log in, you’ll also be able to save the results of your searches, so you can easily come back to them later.

Important Limiters and Labels

The library catalog and the individual databases will allow you to limit your search results to “peer-reviewed” sources. Most of the time, you’ll want to do this because academic work is expected to lean heavily on scholarly journal articles. Only scholarly journals and articles published in them will have that “peer-reviewed” label. However, you should be aware that not everything published in a scholarly journal is necessarily a peer-reviewed article; scholarly journals occasionally also include editorials, book reviews, or letters to the editor. Fortunately, these usually include a label in the title to let you know that they’re one of these other types of articles.

The library catalog will also indicate whether sources are books, ebooks, magazine articles, newspaper articles, or other types of sources. This labeling can be really useful when you are evaluating your sources and when you are figuring out how to cite them!