Information is delivered in a variety of formats with various depths of content and differences in closeness to the origin of a source. There are three classes of sources that identify how closely related information is to an original source. These classes are known as primary, secondary, and tertiary sources.
A primary source is created by someone who experiences an event, a place, or who makes a discovery or creates something. It is also a source that contains direct, firsthand knowledge from such a person.
A secondary source comes from someone without this direct, firsthand experience but who tries to analyze or reinterpret a primary source.
A tertiary source is created by someone who assembles lists of information from firsthand or secondary sources to provide an overview of topics and create reference materials that do not contain new analyses or interpretations.
Each of these source types may be found in the following formats:
Books may be written for the popular audience or for a more specific academic audience. Use a book or an eBook when you want to get a thorough overview of a subject.
Most academic books are now available as eBooks and can be read on your computer, tablet, or mobile device. Accessing eBooks from our databases allows you to go directly to your needed topic by using the table of contents and enables you to make word searches throughout the entire work by making use of the ctrl + F or command + F (for Mac) shortcuts.
(These shortcuts will open a small search box for your keywords. Your results will appear highlighted throughout the text. *This also works with PDFs, Word documents, and most websites!)
The image above is of an eBook in the MCC collection.
Click here to view this eBook.
Remember to make use of the index and the table of contents of a book. This will give you a good overview of the source and allow you to find the information that you seek quickly.
Journals, in the academic sense, are scholarly publications made up of multiple articles written by professors and professionals in a field of work or study.
"Peer-reviewed articles" or "scholarly articles" are journal articles that have been written by researchers or professors and have been reviewed for accuracy by scholars in the same field of study.
You may wonder, "What's so great about finding articles?" The strength of an article lies in its ability to quickly share information on a specific topic or study, which is generally very helpful when doing research.
A journal might cover information about a particular line of work, like Chemical & Engineering News, about business in general like The Beijing Review, or contain scholarly works concerning the field of medicine like The New England Journal of Medicine.
Periodicals are publications that are produced periodically. These include journals, popular magazines, business, trade, professional publications, newspapers, bulletins, and reports.
News comes to us in many different formats. We can access news through news radio transcripts, television broadcasts and documentaries, new media on the Internet (such as blogs or social media), online newswires, and of course magazines and newspapers.
Newspapers contain information about current events and may cover a wide variety of fields including politics, business, sports, art, and science. They often include materials such as opinion columns, weather forecasts, reviews of local services, obituaries, birth notices, crosswords, editorial cartoons, comic strips, and advice columns (Newspaper - Wikipedia).
As a student at MCC, you have access to many newspapers both in full-text and in "image-edition" versions. An image-edition newspaper is a full-color digital version of an in print paper. Below are two newspaper companies the MCC Library subscribes to in image-edition format:
The tutorial above will help you:
So long as your professor or instructor is okay with the use of websites, they can be an excellent source of information. United States government (.gov) and education (.edu) websites are generally very reliable sources to make use of when gathering data in your research.
Please see the Evaluate Research Sources guide to learn more about determining when a website is credible or not.
Reference Sources include sources of quick, factual information and basic or specialized encyclopedias. While you would not want to cite these sources in a college-level paper, you may use these sources to generate topic ideas, become more informed, or obtain background information on your topic. These may include encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks, manuals, and all kinds of sources featuring general information.
Videos encompass various types of motion pictures, such as tutorials, documentaries, and films. When using videos as sources, you must always properly cite them in your document, even though they are not text-based sources.
Documentaries like these may help you with your research:
All images on this page are courtesy of Adobe Stock, ProQuest, Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, Niche Academy, one MCC librarian, and Films on Demand.
