Book- In a book you are most likely to find secondary information. Sometimes you may find primary information. It is great to use for research because most of the time the information is accurate. I could use this in my research by taking a quote or excerpt from a chapter to help explain what I am talking about in my paper.
Blog Post- In a blog post you are most likely to find inaccurate information from someone. Usually these are personal opinions about a topic. I wouldn't use this information in my research unless I was doing research about blogging!
Scholarly Journal Article- These are primary sources. Very useful for research papers because they are peer reviewed. Meaning very smart people have reviewed the article and made revisions to it. I could use these in my research paper if I want the most accurate information on my topic.
Wikipedia- These are tertiary sources. Anyone can make a change to something on wikipedia. Wikipedia articles are not good to use in research for that very reason. I will not use wikipedia in my research paper.
Podcast- These can be secondary sources/ tertiary sources depending on what you are researching. They are a recording of someone's voice. So depending on who the person is, this information could be useful or useless.
Scholarly articles are secondary sources, not primary sources. They are based on primary sources (research data, original accounts of an event, etc.), but they add analysis and draw new conclusions from that raw data. But you're right that they're great for research papers because they're peer reviewed!
ReplyDeleteWikipedia can be useful when you're developing your research question to get some general info, but you're right that you shouldn't use it in your actual paper!
Podcasts may be primary sources, too, if you use it as an example of how people discuss an issue.