Skip to Main Content
It looks like you're using Internet Explorer 11 or older. This website works best with modern browsers such as the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. If you continue with this browser, you may see unexpected results.

or browse databases: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z #

View of Georgetown campus from the Virginia side of the Potomac

View of Georgetown campus from the Virginia side of the Potomac

Primary Sources

How to find and access primary sources.

What are Primary and Secondary Sources?

Primary Sources
Primary sources are the "materials on a topic upon which subsequent interpretations or studies are based, anything from firsthand documents such as poems, diaries, court records, and interviews to research results generated by experiments, surveys, ethnographies, and so on."*

Primary sources are records of events as they are first described, usually by witnesses or people who were involved in the event. Many primary sources were created at the time of the event but can also include memoirs, oral interviews, or accounts that were recorded later. 

Visual materials, such as photos, original artwork, posters, and films are important primary sources, not only for the factual information they contain, but also for the insight they may provide into how people view their world.  Primary sources may also include sets of data, such as census statistics, which have been tabulated but not interpreted. However, in the sciences or social sciences, primary sources report the results of an experiment. 

It can sometimes be difficult to determine whether a particular source is primary or secondary, because the same source can be a primary source for one topic and a secondary source for another topic.  David McCullough’s biography, John Adams, could be a secondary source for a paper about John Adams but a primary source for a paper about how various historians have interpreted the life of John Adams.

*From Hairston, Maxine and John J. Ruszkiewicz. The Scott, Foresman Handbook for Writers. 4th ed. New York: HarperCollins College Publishers, 1996, pg. 547.

Secondary Sources
Secondary sources offer an analysis or a restatement of primary sources. They often attempt to describe or explain primary sources. Some secondary sources not only analyze primary sources, but also use them to argue a contention or persuade the reader to hold a certain opinion. Examples of secondary sources include dictionaries, encyclopedias, textbooks, and books and articles that interpret, analyze, or review research works.

 

More Examples of Primary and Secondary Sources

 

  Primary Source Secondary Source
Art original artwork article critiquing the piece of art
History slave diary book about the Underground Railroad
Literature poem book or article on a particular genre of poetry
Political Science treaty essay on Native American land rights
Science or Social Sciences report of an original experiment review of several studies on the same topic
Theater videotape of a performance biography of a playwright

Creative Commons   This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 International License. | Details of our policy
https://guides.library.georgetown.edu/c.php?g=75611&p=488296
guides.library.georgetown.edu
crawl=CC-MAIN-2021-39
111409
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:PLLHT3TKJD36BAZRS64RWZRPS43TKZSN
<urn:uuid:641188df-c97b-4256-ab71-1f683bb28baf>
2021-09-21T02:42:08Z
54.88.35.99
text/html
sha1:UMPSGZ33OTR34U73Q4MTII7G77ODS5PX
<urn:uuid:41b014d8-8d55-4c19-8a0e-f6ab7172253e>
https://guides.library.georgetown.edu/c.php?g=75611&p=488296
response
<urn:uuid:6bf101fb-db8a-4a79-aa26-e20578fdb071>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-39
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2021
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-93
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/