LibGuides: Primary Sources: Begin Here

Begin Here ⇒ ⇒ ⇒

This guide provides help with finding the primary sources you need for your research, evaluating those sources, and citing them in your paper's bibliography.

Finding Evaluating, and Citing Primary Sources

Books - Britannica ImageQuest On this page you can find the answers to these questions:

What Are Primary Sources? - a definition and a video tutorial

How Do I Distinguish Between a Primary, a Secondary Source, and a Tertiary Source?

How Should I Compare Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Sources Across Disciplines? - Advice from the librarians at Yale University

What Keywords Should I Use? Secure website - Britannica ImageQuest - the keywords to use when searching for primary sources

What Questions Should I Ask? -these can help you decide whether a source is primary or secondary

Look to other pages of this guide for help in finding primary sources on:

Washington State and Pacific Northwest (Alaska, Idaho, and Oregon) History
American History
World History

For help with organizing and citing your sources, see:

MLA Works Cited and In-text Citations
Chicago Citation Style

What Are Primary Sources?

Primary sources are “first hand”accounts of an event, an occurrence, or a time period produced by a participant or observer at the time, or shortly thereafter. They can be published or unpublished.

Typically, primary sources include:

Unique documents or manuscripts - letters, diaries, journals, writings, speeches, photographs, scrapbooks, etc.

Historic records of an organization - correspondence, memoranda, minutes, annual reports, etc.

Government documents - records, maps, and statistical data

Artwork and artifacts

Music and audiovisual materials - film, audio and video tape

Speeches and oral histories - printed transcripts or audio recordings

Photographs and advertisements

Electronic computer files - including emails

This vidoe from the University of Guelph McLaughlin Library explains what primary sources are, and how they differ from secondary sources.

The University of Guelph McLaughlin Library
What are primary sources? And how are they different from secondary sources? YouTube. 29 Aug.
2022. Web. 19 Jul. 2024. .

What Questions Should I Ask?

In the Arts:

1. Was the source created during the time period you're studying? If the answer is yes, you are looking at a primary source.

2. Is it an object from a particular time in history? (Archie Bunker's chair? An Emily Dickinson poem?) This also counts as a primary source.

3. Was the source written after an event took place? If so, it is a secondary source.

In the Sciences:

1. Is the source reporting original research?

2. Did the author(s) carry out this original research?

If the answer to the two above questions is yes, it is a primary source.

WSA Databases with Primary Sources

You can use this list of WSA databases with primary sources as a starting point for your research. See the box below for suggestions on what keywords to use when searching WSA databases for primary sources.

WSA Databases with Primary Sources
Click this link to open up a list of WSA databases with primary source material. The databases here cover a wide range of subject matter and include different types of primary sources;

What Keywords Should I Use?

Using the General Keyword search box - type in your topic plus one of the following words or phrases:

Word cloud of primary source keyword search terms created on WordClouds.com Archive Source*
Correspondence
Diar* (this retrieves both
         Diary and Diaries)
History Archive*
     History Document*
History Source*
Interview*
     Letter*
Personal Narrative*
     Primary source*
  Speech*

Note: Use of the * at the end of a word will search for both singular and plural forms.

How Do I Distinguish Between a Primary Source, a Secondary Source and a Tertiary Source?

Primary sources are the surviving original records of a period, eyewitness accounts and first-published documentation of new information.

Examples of primary sources include:

Peer-reviewed journal articles about one's original research or ideas.
Autobiographies, letters, diaries, and journals describing one's personal experience, activities, and the people, places and events at the time.
Oral histories, interviews and ethnographic research records.
Sound and video recordings of an event or people.
Published material written at the time, such as newspapers, books and articles.
Government or court records including birth and death certificates, deeds, trial transcripts, census records, patents, treaties and other documents.
Business records such as reports, surveys and minutes of meetings and conferences that document contemporaneous activities, people and events.
Art such as architecture, sculpture, photographs, drawings, maps, posters and cartoons.
Written creations such as literary works, sacred texts and musical scores.
Artifacts such as tools, weapons, crafts, furniture, buildings, roads, machines or other objects made by humans living at the time.

Gardner, Ella, and United States Children's Bureau. Public Dance Halls, Their Regulation and Place in the Recreation of Adolescents. Washington, U.S. Govt. Print. Off, 1929. Image. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.

Secondary sources interpret the past and analyze primary sources.

Examples of secondary sources include:

Journal articles that review the original work of others.
Biographies and histories written by people who did not experience events or the time first-hand.
Commentaries and criticism of primary sources.
Historical studies, literature reviews and textbooks.
Magazine articles and Web pages which describe events or ideas a substantial time after they have occurred.

Martin, Carol. "Legislation Relevant to Dance Marathons." Appendix to Dance Marathons: Performing American Culture of the 1920s and 1930s, 147-60. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Accessed July 10, 2024. Internet Archive Books.

Tertiary sources are distillations and indexes of primary and secondary sources.

Examples of tertiary sources include:

Encyclopedias
Textbooks
Dictionaries
Handbooks
Almanacs
Digests and abstracts
Indexes and bibliographies

"'Fads and Crazes.'" Topic Overview to 1920-1929., edited by Judith S. Baughman, Victor Bondi, Richard Layman, Tandy McConnell, and Vincent Tompkins. Vol. 3 American Decades. Detroit, MI: Gale, 2001. Accessed July 10, 2024..

How Should I Compare Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Sources Across Academic Disciplines?

Examples of primary, secondary, and tertiary sources by subject discipline

SUBJECT	PRIMARY	SECONDARY	TERTIARY
Art History	Painting, photograph, film	Critical review of an artist’s work	Encyclopedia article on the artist
Biology	A bird specimen	A scholarly book on bird behavior	EBSCO Academic eBooks database; Nest Building and Bird Behavior
Chemistry	Article presenting original scientific research, unpublished data, correspondence and original notes	Review of recent research in the field summarizing new articles, patents, etc.	Handbook of basic tables for chemical analysis
History	Diary, correspondence, photograph, census data	Book about the American Industrial Revolution and its effect on rural culture	Timeline of the American Industrial Revolution
Literature	Novel, poem, manuscript, correspondence	Essay analyzing an author’s writing process	Handbook of twentieth-century authors
Music	Manuscript score, print edition from composer’s lifetime, first recording of a jazz piece	Essay analyzing the music or the composer’s compositional process, recording of a work without composer’s input	Thematic catalog of a composer’s works; discography of a jazz artist
Political Science	Treaty, government document or memo	Diplomatic history textbook	Chronology of treaties

Adapted from "Primary Sources at Yale". Accessed
July 10, 2024. https://primarysources.yale.edu/find-discover.

Acknowledgement

This subject guide is based on the History - Primary Sources guide created by Robert Hudson, Reference Librarian, for Cape Fear Community College Libraries in Wilmington, North Carolina.