Secondary source

In scholarship, a secondary source[1][2] is a document or recording that relates or discusses information originally presented elsewhere.

In a secondary source, the original information is selected, modified and arranged in a suitable format.

[1][7] Information can be interpreted from a wide variety of found objects, but source classification for primary or secondary status, etc., is applicable only to symbolic sources, which are those objects meant to communicate information, either publicly or privately, to some person, known or unknown.

Typical symbolic sources include written documents such as letters, notes, receipts, ledgers, manuscripts, reports, or public signage, or graphic art, etc,; but do not include, for example, bits of broken pottery or scraps of food excavated from a midden—and this regardless of how much information can be extracted from an ancient trash heap, or how little can be extracted from a written document.

[11] Other examples for which a source can be assigned both primary and secondary roles would include an obituary or a survey of several volumes of a journal to count the frequency of articles on a certain topic.

[12] Further, whether a source is regarded as primary or secondary in a given context may change over time, depending upon the past and present states of knowledge within the field of study.

[14] Attempts to map or model scientific and scholarly communications need the concepts of primary, secondary and further "levels" of classification.

Primary source materials are typically defined as "original research papers written by the scientists who actually conducted the study."

An example of primary source material 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.

[22] Following the Rankean model established by German scholarship in the 19th century, historians use archives of primary sources.