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Primary vs Secondary Sources

Your professor asked you to distinguish between primary and secondary sources. So what's the difference between them? Let's say you keep a diary, and you've written in it for a long time. That would be a primary source by and about you. Suppose you let your friend read your diary, and she decides to write something about you and what you wrote. That would be a secondary source.

Now, imagine you're a world famous author and you wrote your autobiography.

That would be:

primary source

secondary source

So your autobiography is published, and a scholar writes about your autobiography in a scholarly psychology journal and analyzes some of the events in your life as related in your book.

That would be:

primary source

secondary source

Now imagine you are a scientist conducting breakthrough research on DNA. You write up a report on your findings and include all lab data. That would be a primary source. Then another scientist reads your report and critiques it; that would be a secondary source.

Other examples of primary sources include:

• a court transcript
• an eyewitness account
• a speech by someone
• letters written by someone

All of the above are first-hand reports. As soon as someone else writes an interpretation of the original source, it is considered secondary (or second-hand).

You will use both primary and secondary information sources in your research. Both are acceptable, but you need to be able to distinguish whether they are first-hand (primary) or second-hand (secondary) accounts. Are they written by the author, scientist or researcher? Or are they written about the author, scientist or researcher? It's that simple.

What kind of information does the topic you have selected require? Primary? Secondary?

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