Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Sources

Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Sources

Primary, secondary, and tertiary sources are mandatory for any credible research project. Getting familiar with them now will assure you an easy college and career research experience. Yes, you will do research after college! As a matter of fact, you do research almost daily when you use resources to help you make decisions as basic as a menu with descriptions to decide what dinner special to order or what fancy coffee you’ll get to start your day to more complicated research such as choosing the best car or college for your current needs. Eventually you’ll have to do research to determine which job/career, home, and even state best suits you to start your adult life.

The UNSW (Sydney) library has a nice webpage that will help you work your way through primary and secondary types of sources. Galileo offers specific searches for primary source documents under its "Search by Type" tab.

Tertiary Sources are resources such as your textbook, dictionaries, thesauri, and encyclopedias. Most are good places to start when you need more background or "starting" information on a topic. While they are excellent starting points especially for topics that are new to you, true academic research does not allow for citing of tertiary sources in formal research.