Terms and Essays

For a review of "What do we mean by 'published'?" and "What do we mean by 'accessible'?" see proposed definitions, which enjoy some community support at Wikipedia:Published

Please read our guideline on whether a source is a reliable source. For questions on a specific type of source, please post your question to the reliable sources noticeboard.

On the topic of "What is a good source?", see the essay evaluating sources, started Dec 2007, which has been undergoing peer review. Also see a new essay on Assessing reliability of sources‎ which has been submitted (Jan 2008) for peer-review. For how to properly cite sources see citing your sources.

Types of Sources

What is a primary source?

When an author publishes their experimental data, research, observations, biography, or whatever, the entire publication is a primary source. Unpublished manuscripts, articles, films, etc are also primary sources, just unpublished ones.

Here are some things confusing for some people, which do NOT change a primary source into a secondary source:

"Collecting" and "Organizing", i.e. taking fields notes, experimental data, pictures, letters, and other documents and making a rough draft from this collection — provided that the set of items comes from substantially the same events that led to the desire to create the final source;
"Selecting", i.e. in some cases large amounts of material are combed and pieces are selected for publication;
"Peer-review" / "Vetting"; i.e. getting your peers or some agency to verify or review your work;
"Transcribing", i.e. changing the type of media from one to another, such as changing handwriting into text, changing text into an image, changing a filmstrip into a DVD;
"Amending" and "Editing" i.e. taking the product in its current unfinalized form and adding comments, analysis, interpretation, citations and copyediting;
"Publishing", i.e. making your final product available to the public to hear, view or purchase.

All of the above steps are considered part of the standard and normal process that ends with the previously-anticipated final product. When a work is finalized the author(s), all of the above is part of the entire process to create the final work. The steps, for our purposes are not considered seperate artistic products, and therefore do not create seperate types of product.

What is a secondary source?

Secondary sources are formed when one or more primary sources are used as a backdrop from which to create a brand new artistic expression. Vetting, transcribing (or other purely mechanical form-alteration), collecting, reviewing, copyediting, are not relevant to the type of source; that is the acts of editing in all their forms, re-forming in all its forms, and fixing in media in all its forms, do not change the type of source. These are considered either purely mechanical functions, or purely editorial functions. They are not relevant to the type of artistic expression the work contains.

Recent example #1

College Transcripts

A college transcript is merely the mechanically reproduced, edited, vetted, inputted, published form of the original underlying report-mark notes, even though themselves created possibly by many different people. This is merely the final published form of a process that runs through several steps as above. A college transcript does not convey a new type of artistic expression, a new sort of work, a new previously unexpected or unknown final result. It is merely the end-result of a known process that was already known to end in this particular final product. The entire process from beginning to end is a primary source.

Recent example #2

A publication composed of a short introduction followed by a series of bibliographic citations with abstracts, and a brief concluding remark, explaining who "prepared" the publication.

This publication presents the following interesting problem : "Who wrote the abstracts?"

The original authors

If a publication merely consists of the collecting together of previously published items, in brief or in full, and has a minimal amount of analysis, interpretation or synthesis, then it itself is merely a reprint, but now as a collection, of previously published material. The type of source does not change from primary to secondary because of this reprinting. If the underlying sources were primary, the reprint is still primary, if they were secondary, the reprint is still secondary.

This situation also covers things like collections of short stores or letters, indexes to marriage books or land records. That is, compiling material, does not make the work secondary. Compiling is a mechanical action that does not represent a new work of art.

The compiler

However. If the compiler of the new publication, read the underlying sources and her-or- himself wrote the abstracts, then the new publication would be a secondary source. Writing is an art form and the writer is creating a brand-new artistic expression never before seen.