13.4 Types of Sources

Beyond avoiding plagiarism, using sources effectively allows you to draw on the expertise of others to support your points. Using sources effectively also helps the reader understand how you are situated with different findings, ideas, and arguments in conversation with one another, as well as how you yourself are participating in that conversation.

To help you master these skills, this section will review the different kinds of sources and citation forms that you are likely to encounter in technical and professional writing.

Primary Sources and Secondary Sources

Primary sources are direct, firsthand sources of information or data. These are sources that are fixed in a point in time and typically do not contain analysis or discussion. For example, if you were writing a report about the First Amendment right to freedom of speech, the text of the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights would be a primary source. Other types of primary sources include the following:

• Data sets (your own or from a published source)
• Surveys
• Interviews
• Photographs
• Visuals such as schematics or plans
• Historical and some government documents
• Art & literature, including but not limited to novels, paintings, musical recordings, movies, and video games

Secondary sources discuss, interpret, analyze, consolidate, or otherwise rework information from primary sources. In researching a report about freedom of speech, you might read articles about legal cases that involved First Amendment rights, or editorials expressing commentary on the First Amendment. These sources would be considered secondary sources because they are one step removed from the primary source of information. Other examples of secondary sources include the following:

• Biographies
• Histories and historical analysis
• Journal articles
• News articles and commentaries
• Video essays
• Textbooks

Your topic, audience, and purpose determine whether you must use both primary and secondary sources in your document. Ask yourself which sources are most likely to provide the information that will answer your research questions. If you are writing a research report about cyber security, you will need to use some experts as a primary source, but secondary sources, such as published research, are also important. If you are writing about the LASIK procedure as a pre-med student, you will probably want to read the published results of scientific studies, but secondary sources, such as news stories and/or magazine articles discussing the outcome of a recent study, may also be helpful.

This section is adapted from Using sources in your document in Howdy or Hello? Technical and Professional Communication Copyright © 2022 by Matt McKinney, Kalani Pattison, Sarah LeMire, Kathy Anders, and Nicole Hagstrom-Schmidt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.