4.6 Citational Practice: Writing from Sources
Jemma Llewellyn; Erin Kelly; Sara Humphreys; Tina Bebbington; Nancy Ami; and Natalie Boldt
The word “source” can seem a bit intimidating or mysterious, so let’s define what is meant when your instructor asks you to find sources. There are three different types of sources that you need to consider when you are performing academic research: primary sources, secondary sources and tertiary sources.
Primary Sources: Primary source material is generally raw data that is under analysis. Primary source material can include, but is certainly not limited to, original manuscripts, archival documents, measurement of phenomena, survey results, lab results, data others have gathered, and a myriad of other forms and types of materials that define your topic. For example, if your topic is pine beetle infestations, then your data will likely come from what academic researchers have found in specific geographical areas.
Secondary Sources: These source materials interpret and discuss primary source materials. These can be used to assist in the problem solving of a research question and to provide commentary about a field of interest. Secondary sources often generalize, analyze, synthesize, or evaluate the original primary sources. As an undergraduate student, you will likely spend most of your time finding, reading, and analyzing secondary materials, such as peer-reviewed journal articles, for your research.
Tertiary Sources: These are general or popular forms of information that synthesize primary and secondary sources, usually in a way that will be understood by an audience that doesn’t have expertise in the field. These sources may come in the form of blogs, popular books, magazine and newspaper articles, encyclopedia articles (think Wikipedia), or links from a Google search. Use these sources as a way to investigate your interests in a topic area; they can help you find out exactly what it is you want to discuss in your research. These sources, however, are not the best options to support a scholarly argument as the information in these sources tends to be generalized and (over)simplified.
Once you have found your primary, secondary, and tertiary sources, you then need to cite those sources in your writing. In many classes, the sources you will consult when researching will be recorded in some kind of form, most often in written form. Using sources in a way that both respects the source and your own work requires understanding citational practice. You might have never heard this phrase before in your life. Here’s a rather technical definition that we will unpack:
Citation is a constitutive dimension of human language and social life in the sense that we constantly reproduce what we hear in order to fashion ourselves. Found everywhere to different “degrees and kinds” (Barber 2008, p. 209), citation occurs across all media and in virtually every type of linguistic performance and must be considered “a perpetual rather