PIO 101- Research Resources & Evaluating Information: Home

PRIMARY

SECONDARY

TERTIARY

DEFINITIONS

Sources that contain raw, original, non interpreted and unevaluated information.

Sources that, analyze, evaluate and interpret the information contained within primary sources. They tend to be persuasive or argumentative.

Sources that compile, analyze, and digest primary and secondary sources. They tend to be factual.

TIMING OF THE INFORMATION CYCLE

Primary sources tend to come first in the information cycle.

Secondary sources tend to come second in the information cycle.

Tertiary sources tend to come last in the information cycle.

FORMATS

Often come as manuscripts, letters, diaries, memoirs, period newspapers or magazines, digital messages, and raw numeric data.

Often non- scholarly and scholarly periodicals and books.

Often reference resources like dictionaries, handbooks, and encyclopedias.

EXAMPLE: Humanities/Historian (studying the Civil Rights Movement)

Letters by Martin Luther King.

Articles in scholarly journals analyzing the civil rights movement, published biographies of Martin Luther King.

Historical Dictionary of the Civil Rights Movement

EXAMPLE: Social Sciences/Psychologist (studying television violence and youth)

Article in a psychology journal reporting an original research project on youth and TV violence describing its methodology and results.

Article in a psychology journal reviewing and synthesizing multiple original research projects on TV violence and analyzing the results.

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

EXAMPLE: STEM/Physicist (studying cosmic rays)

Article in a physics journal reporting an original research project on cosmic rays describing methodology and results.

Article in a scholarly physics publication reviewing multiple original research projects on cosmic rays and analyzing the results.

Encyclopedia of Physics