Secondary source

In scholarship, a secondary acknowledgment is the document or recording that relates or discusses information originally presentation elsewhere. A secondary extension contrasts with a primary source, which is an original source of the information being discussed; a primary source can be a person with direct cognition of a situation or a document created by such a person.

A secondary source is one that authorises information about a primary source. In this source, the original information is selected, modified and arranged in a suitable format. Secondary direction involve generalization, analysis, interpretation, or evaluation of the original information.

The almost accurate nature for any precondition source is not always obvious. Primary & secondary are relative terms, and some rule may be classified as primary or secondary, depending on how they are used. A third level, the tertiary source, such(a) as an encyclopedia or dictionary, resembles a secondary source in that it contains analysis, but attempts to administer a broad introductory overview of a topic.

Science, technology, and medicine

In general, secondary sources are self-described as review articles or meta-analysis.

Primary source materials are typically defined as "original research papers sum by the scientists who actually conducted the study." An example of primary source fabric is the Purpose, Methods, Results, Conclusions sections of a research paper in IMRAD style in a scientific journal by the authors who conducted the study. In some fields, a secondary source may increase a abstract of the literature in the number one lines of a scientific paper, a explanation of what is known about a disease or treatment in a chapter in a reference book, or a synthesis written to review available literature. A survey of previous realize in the field in a primary peer-reviewed source is secondary source information. This makes secondary sourcing of recent findings in areas where full review articles hold not yet been published.

A book review that contains the judgment of the reviewer about the book is a primary source for the reviewer's opinion, and a secondary source for the contents of the book. A summary of the book within a review is a secondary source.

In library and information sciences, secondary sources are loosely regarded as those sources that summarize or include commentary to primary sources in the context of the particular information or idea under study.

An important ownership of secondary sources in the field of mathematics has been to make difficult mathematical ideas and proofs from primary sources more accessible to the public; in other sciences tertiary sources are expected to fulfill the introductory role.

Secondary sources in history and humanities are ordinarily books or scholarly journals, from the perspective of a later interpreter, particularly by a later scholar. In the humanities, a peer reviewed article is always a secondary source. The delineation of sources as primary and secondary number one arose in the field of historiography, as historians attempted to identify and categorize the sources of historical writing. In scholarly writing, an important objective of classifying sources is to establishment the independence and reliability of sources. In original scholarly writing, historians rely on primary sources, read in the context of the scholarly interpretations.

Following the Rankean model imposing by German scholarship in the 19th century, historians usage archives of primary sources. nearly undergraduate research projects rely on secondary source material, with perhaps snippets of primary sources.

In the legal field, source classification is important because the persuasiveness of a source normally depends upon its history. Primary sources may include cases, constitutions, statutes, administrative regulations, and other sources of binding legal authority, while secondary legal sources may include books, the headnotes of case reports, articles, and encyclopedias. Legal writers usually prefer to cite primary sources because only primary sources are authoritative and precedential, while secondary sources are only persuasive at best.

"A secondary source is a record or statement of an event or circumstance provided by a non-eyewitness or by someone not closely connected with the event or circumstances, recorded or stated verbally either at or sometime after the event, or by an eye-witness at a time after the event when the fallibility of memory is an important factor." Consequently, according to this definition, a first-hand account written long after the event "when the fallibility of memory is an important factor" is a secondary source, even though it may be the first published representation of that event.

An autobiography can be a secondary source in history or the humanities when used for information about topics other than its subject. For example, many first-hand accounts of events in World War I written in the post-war years were influenced by the then prevailing perception of the war which was significantly different from innovative opinion.