By the end of Tutorial 2: Understanding Source Types, you should know how to:
Estimated tutorial time: 25 minutes
Before you spend much time looking for information on your topic, you will need to think about and define your information need. There is a wealth of information to be found in the library and on the open web - making the right selection of sources will depend on what information best addresses the questions you need to answer. When thinking about types of information available, ask yourself questions such as:
Once you determine what information you need, you're ready to select the types of sources that best fit your need.
Primary sources document an event first-hand and are created or written by someone who experienced or witnessed the event themselves. For example, diaries, letters, speeches, interviews, memoirs or autobiographies, and photographs can serve as primary sources.
In the sciences, primary sources are documents about original research written by the original researchers themselves. Primary sources can also include raw data, an artifact from an archeological dig, or a newspaper article or social media post written soon after a historical event took place. The Libraries' Primary Sources Research Guide includes resources and research tips to help you find different types of primary sources.
Secondary sources describe or analyze primary sources. Types of secondary sources include articles and books that interpret, review, or synthesize original research articles or other primary sources. Secondary sources might include original analysis, but they get their evidence or data from other sources.
Use websites to find things like current information and news, general background or overview information, expert opinions (and lots of popular opinions too!), company information, and government information. Internet sources don't have uniform quality standards. Anyone and everyone can publish content online, and a lot of the time you don't know who the author or creator is or what their experience or expertise is. You should always evaluate online information carefully to make sure it is reliable and trustworthy (we'll discuss this more in Tutorial 5: Evaluating Information).
Encyclopedias contain relatively short, factual, overview articles that are usually written by topic experts. Wikipedia is a free, crowd-sourced example of an online encyclopedia.
Encyclopedias are an excellent place to find background information and gather important dates, names, and concepts related to your topic. If you would like to use encyclopedias other than Wikipedia, you can find many formally published encyclopedias in the library catalog or by using the Libraries' Encyclopedias Research Guide, which includes links to reference collections such as CREDO Reference, Oxford Reference, and Britannica Online.
Newspapers and online news sites contain fact-checked articles about current events and are usually published daily. Use newspapers to find current information about international, national, and local events. Also use them to identify trends in public opinion. Older archival issues of newspapers provide a record of past ideas, problems, and events, which is helpful for in-depth historical research. You can find newspapers on the open web or in the Libraries' Newspaper Research Guide.
Magazines contain articles that are written to inform and entertain the general public. These articles are designed to be easy to read, which can make them a good starting point when you're first trying to understand a topic. They can also provide a contemporary point of view and information or opinions about popular culture or current events.
Government publications are issued by local, state, national, or international governmental bodies or organizations. Government information includes laws, regulations, statistics, consumer information, and much more. A substantial amount of government information is available online. Examples: 2010 Census Data (U.S. Census Bureau); National Center for Education Statistics (U.S. Department of Education); UNESCO Institute for Statistics (United Nations).
Company profiles often include a business description, financial statements, competitors, key employees, and more. Industry reports often include market forecasts, trends, challenges, and more. You can find company profiles and industry reports in article databases like Business Source Premier (for company profiles, click "Company Profiles" on the blue bar at the top of the page) and First Research (includes industry reports from Dun & Bradstreet).
Use books when you need to gather a lot of information on a topic, contextualize your topic, find historical information, or find summaries of research to support an argument. You can find books and eBooks (academic as well as "general" or "popular") in the library catalog.
Academic books are typically written by academics (e.g., college professors) and/or published by a university press (e.g., University of Minnesota Press, Stanford University Press). They provide a comprehensive, thorough treatment of a subject, and all academic books contain a detailed bibliography of sources at the end of the book. Some academic books synthesize information on a topic to support a particular argument or thesis. Other types of academic books are edited anthologies where each chapter is written by a different author and an editor brings all of these chapters together as a whole.
Scholarly articles are written by experts, for experts, in a narrow field of research. These articles are published in scholarly journals, and you can search collections of scholarly articles in many of the Libraries' databases. Scholarly articles are dense and often use terms with which the general public (or first-year students new to a major) might not be familiar. Original research articles frequently use similar headings or sections within the article (e.g., Abstract, Introduction, Literature Review, Methods, Analysis, Conclusion), and they almost always include detailed bibliographies.
We usually recommend having you start off by reading more general introductions to your topic and refining your research topic before having you dive into narrowly focused scholarly articles. But once you know the basics on your topic, scholarly articles are useful for gaining an in-depth understanding of your topic, learning how others in a discipline have researched that topic and what questions or areas for further research still remain, and finding bibliographies that direct you to other relevant information.
Peer-Reviewed Articles: Your instructors will sometimes specify that they want you to use peer-reviewed articles, a subset of scholarly articles that are "peer reviewed" or vetted by other scholars (the author's peers in that particular field) for accuracy, quality, and importance. If you are not sure if an article you found is peer-reviewed, check online for details about the journal in which the article was published or ask your librarian! Many of the Libraries databases (which we'll cover in more detail in Tutorial 4: Searching a Database) include an option for limiting your search results to only peer-reviewed articles.
Watch this short video to learn how peer review works:
Source: “Peer Review in 3 Minutes” by North Carolina State University Libraries, licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US License.