Identifying Different Types of Sources/Primary Sources

Primary Sources

As a rule of thumb, you can think of primary sources as being ‘primary’ because the information in them is coming to you directly from the person/people responsible for it (i.e. it is ‘primary’ because nobody else has adapted the message intended by the original author(s)).

Because the information in primary sources comes straight from the person/people who created it, there is less concern about how another author might have interpreted or misinterpreted the source. Thus, employing primary sources in scholarly writing is generally encouraged.

That being said, how we think about primary sources varies by discipline.

• In STEM disciplines, primary sources detail the results and interpretations of original research and experiments (and are typically written in IMRAD report structure).
• In the Humanities, primary sources are original documents, texts, and materials that are used for analysis and evidence. These might include historical documents, poems, novels, film, newspaper articles, or other archival or multimedia materials. As such, in the Arts, many scholarly articles are in fact “secondary sources” (which we discuss next) that build from non-scholarly primary sources.