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Unit 10: Role of Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Documents in the Growth and Development of Social Science
y Journal articles Notes
y Monographs
A secondary source contains commentary on or discussion about a primary source. The most important
feature of secondary sources is that they offer an interpretation of information gathered from primary
sources.
Tertiary Sources
y Dictionaries
y Encyclopedias
y Handbooks
A tertiary source presents summaries or condensed versions of materials, usually with references back
to the primary and/or secondary sources. They can be a good place to look up facts or get a general
overview of a subject, but they rarely contain original material.
Examples
Subject Primary Secondary Tertiary
Critical review of the Encyclopedia article on
Art Painting
painting the artist
History Civil War diary Book on a Civil War Battle List of battle sites
Essay about themes in the
Literature Novel or poem Biography of the author
work
Political Geneva Article about prisoners of Chronology of treaties
science Convention war
Let us, now, discuss some of the main sources of information and their role in development and
growth of social science:
10.1 Documentary Sources of Information
The recorded knowledge and literature is one of the important information sources. The concept of
literature taken here in the sense of scholarly literature is used as a communication system for the
access creation and dissemination of information. The documentary sources of information can be
classified into following categories:
10.1.1 Primary Sources
A Primary sources or document is one in which the information contained is original or first
disseminated formulation of any new observation or experiment. It will consist of new information
for the very first time thus, the term primary means, the basic sources of that particular information,
in documentary form.
Primary sources may further be divided into
1. Conventional Primary Sources
2. Non–conventional Primary Sources
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