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The Literature Review

Primary and secondary sources, the literature review: primary and secondary sources.

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  • Primary vs secondary sources: The differences explained 

Can something be both a primary and secondary source?

Research for your literature review can be categorised as either primary or secondary in nature. The simplest definition of primary sources is either original information (such as survey data) or a first person account of an event (such as an interview transcript). Whereas secondary sources are any publshed or unpublished works that describe, summarise, analyse, evaluate, interpret or review primary source materials. Secondary sources can incorporate primary sources to support their arguments.

Ideally, good research should use a combination of both primary and secondary sources. For example, if a researcher were to investigate the introduction of a law and the impacts it had on a community, he/she might look at the transcripts of the parliamentary debates as well as the parliamentary commentary and news reporting surrounding the laws at the time. 

Examples of primary and secondary sources

Primary vs secondary sources: The differences explained

Finding primary sources

  • VU Special Collections  - The Special Collections at Victoria University Library are a valuable research resource. The Collections have strong threads of radical literature, particularly Australian Communist literature, much of which is rare or unique. Women and urban planning also feature across the Collections. There are collections that give you a picture of the people who donated them like Ray Verrills, John McLaren, Sir Zelman Cowen, and Ruth & Maurie Crow. Other collections focus on Australia's neighbours – PNG and Timor-Leste.
  • POLICY - Sharing the latest in policy knowledge and evidence, this database supports enhanced learning, collaboration and contribution.
  • Indigenous Australia  -  The Indigenous Australia database represents the collections of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission Library.
  • Australian Heritage Bibliography - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Subset (AHB-ATSIS)  - AHB is a bibliographic database that indexes and abstracts articles from published and unpublished material on Australia's natural and cultural environment. The AHB-ATSIS subset contains records that specifically relate to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.include journal articles, unpublished reports, books, videos and conference proceedings from many different sources around Australia. Emphasis is placed on reports written or commissioned by government and non-government heritage agencies throughout the country.
  • ATSIhealth  - The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Bibliography (ATSIhealth), compiled by Neil Thomson and Natalie Weissofner at the School of Indigenous Australian Studies, Kurongkurl Katitjin, Edith Cowan University, is a bibliographic database that indexes published and unpublished material on Australian Indigenous health. Source documents include theses, unpublished articles, government reports, conference papers, abstracts, book chapters, books, discussion and working papers, and statistical documents. 
  • National Archive of Australia  - The National Archives of Australia holds the memory of our nation and keeps vital Australian Government records safe. 
  • National Library of Australia: Manuscripts  - Manuscripts collection that is wide ranging and provides rich evidence of the lives and activities of Australians who have shaped our society.
  • National Library of Australia: Printed ephemera  - The National Library has been selectively collecting Australian printed ephemera since the early 1960s as a record of Australian life and social customs, popular culture, national events, and issues of national concern.
  • National Library of Australia: Oral history and folklore - The Library’s Oral History and Folklore Collection dates back to the 1950’s and includes a rich and diverse collection of interviews and recordings with Australians from all walks of life.
  • Historic Hansard - Commonwealth of Australia parliamentary debates presented in an easy-to-read format for historians and other lovers of political speech.
  • The Old Bailey Online - A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court.

Whether or not a source can be considered both primary and  secondary, depends on the context. In some instances, material may act as a secondary source for one research area, and as a primary source for another. For example, Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince , published in 1513, is an important secondary source for any study of the various Renaissance princes in the Medici family; but the same book is also a primary source for the political thought that was characteristic of the sixteenth century because it reflects the attitudes of a person living in the 1500s.

Source: Craver, 1999, as cited in University of South Australia Library. (2021, Oct 6).  Can something be a primary and secondary source?.  University of South Australia Library. https://guides.library.unisa.edu.au/historycultural/sourcetypes

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Literature Review - what is a Literature Review, why it is important and how it is done

  • Strategies to Find Sources

Evaluating Literature Reviews and Sources

Reading critically, tips to evaluate sources.

  • Tips for Writing Literature Reviews
  • Writing Literature Review: Useful Sites
  • Citation Resources
  • Other Academic Writings
  • Useful Resources

A good literature review evaluates a wide variety of sources (academic articles, scholarly books, government/NGO reports). It also evaluates literature reviews that study similar topics. This page offers you a list of resources and tips on how to evaluate the sources that you may use to write your review.

  • A Closer Look at Evaluating Literature Reviews Excerpt from the book chapter, “Evaluating Introductions and Literature Reviews” in Fred Pyrczak’s Evaluating Research in Academic Journals: A Practical Guide to Realistic Evaluation , (Chapter 4 and 5). This PDF discusses and offers great advice on how to evaluate "Introductions" and "Literature Reviews" by listing questions and tips. First part focus on Introductions and in page 10 in the PDF, 37 in the text, it focus on "literature reviews".
  • Tips for Evaluating Sources (Print vs. Internet Sources) Excellent page that will guide you on what to ask to determine if your source is a reliable one. Check the other topics in the guide: Evaluating Bibliographic Citations and Evaluation During Reading on the left side menu.

To be able to write a good Literature Review, you need to be able to read critically. Below are some tips that will help you evaluate the sources for your paper.

Reading critically (summary from How to Read Academic Texts Critically)

  • Who is the author? What is his/her standing in the field.
  • What is the author’s purpose? To offer advice, make practical suggestions, solve a specific problem, to critique or clarify?
  • Note the experts in the field: are there specific names/labs that are frequently cited?
  • Pay attention to methodology: is it sound? what testing procedures, subjects, materials were used?
  • Note conflicting theories, methodologies and results. Are there any assumptions being made by most/some researchers?
  • Theories: have they evolved overtime?
  • Evaluate and synthesize the findings and conclusions. How does this study contribute to your project?

Useful links:

  • How to Read a Paper (University of Waterloo, Canada) This is an excellent paper that teach you how to read an academic paper, how to determine if it is something to set aside, or something to read deeply. Good advice to organize your literature for the Literature Review or just reading for classes.

Criteria to evaluate sources:

  • Authority : Who is the author? what is his/her credentials--what university he/she is affliliated? Is his/her area of expertise?
  • Usefulness : How this source related to your topic? How current or relevant it is to your topic?
  • Reliability : Does the information comes from a reliable, trusted source such as an academic journal?

Useful site - Critically Analyzing Information Sources (Cornell University Library)

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The Library, Technological University of the Shannon: Midwest

Research-Methodology

Literature review sources

Sources for literature review can be divided into three categories as illustrated in table below. In your dissertation you will need to use all three categories of literature review sources:

Sources for literature review and examples

Generally, your literature review should integrate a wide range of sources such as:

  • Books . Textbooks remain as the most important source to find models and theories related to the research area. Research the most respected authorities in your selected research area and find the latest editions of books authored by them. For example, in the area of marketing the most notable authors include Philip Kotler, Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell, Emanuel Rosen and others.
  • Magazines . Industry-specific magazines are usually rich in scholarly articles and they can be effective source to learn about the latest trends and developments in the research area. Reading industry magazines can be the most enjoyable part of the literature review, assuming that your selected research area represents an area of your personal and professional interests, which should be the case anyways.
  • Newspapers can be referred to as the main source of up-to-date news about the latest events related to the research area. However, the proportion of the use of newspapers in literature review is recommended to be less compared to alternative sources of secondary data such as books and magazines. This is due to the fact that newspaper articles mainly lack depth of analyses and discussions.
  • Online articles . You can find online versions of all of the above sources. However, note that the levels of reliability of online articles can be highly compromised depending on the source due to the high levels of ease with which articles can be published online. Opinions offered in a wide range of online discussion blogs cannot be usually used in literature review. Similarly, dissertation assessors are not keen to appreciate references to a wide range of blogs, unless articles in these blogs are authored by respected authorities in the research area.

Your secondary data sources may comprise certain amount of grey literature as well. The term grey literature refers to type of literature produced by government, academics, business and industry in print and electronic formats, which is not controlled by commercial publishers. It is called ‘grey’ because the status of the information in grey literature is not certain. In other words, any publication that has not been peer reviewed for publication is grey literature.

The necessity to use grey literature arises when there is no enough peer reviewed publications are available for the subject of your study.

Literature review sources

John Dudovskiy

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Humanities LibreTexts

1.1: What is Literature?

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  • Heather Ringo & Athena Kashyap
  • City College of San Francisco via ASCCC Open Educational Resources Initiative

Defining Literature

In order for us to study literature with any kind of depth, first we must decide what constitutes literature. While works like William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird are almost universally accepted as literature, other works are hotly debated, or included or excluded based on the context. For example, while most consider Toni Morrison’s Beloved literature, others debate whether more recent publications such as David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas or Rupi Kaur’s Instagram poetry constitute literature. And what about the stories told through tweets, like Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box” ? What about video games, like Skyrim , or memes, like Grumpy Cat?

Students often throw their hands up in the air over such distinctions, arguing literature is subjective. Isn't it up to individual opinion? Anything can be literature, such students argue. At first glance, it could seem such distinctions are, at best, arbitrary. At worst, such definitions function as a means of enforcing cultural erasure.

However, consider a story about Kim Kardashian’s plastic surgery in People Magazine . Can this be considered on the same level of literary achievement as Hamlet ? Most would concede there is a difference in quality between these two texts. A blurb about Kim Kardashian’s latest plastic surgery, most would agree, does not constitute literature. So how can we differentiate between such works?

Literature vs. literature

As illustrated in the somewhat silly example above, one way we can define what constitutes literature is by identifying what is definitely not literature. For our intents and purposes of defining most terms in this textbook, we will use the Oxford English Dictionary ’s definitions. Many professors who teach Literature use the concept of Big L Literature vs. little l literature (Rollison).

While the definition of little l literature is fairly easy to understand and apply, the definition of Big L Literature remains amorphous. What makes a work “artistic”? How do we define “superior” or “lasting”?

Let’s break down some of the defining qualities of literature in a bit more detail, starting with the word “artistic.”

Exercise 1.1.1

Consider the following works of art. Which of these images do you feel is higher quality or more “artistic”? Which is lower-quality or less artistic? Why? Justify your position by analyzing the elements of each artwork.

man in dark suit stands on mountain overlooking a sea of clouds

While there may be some debate, most students usually respond that Friedrich's painting is more artistic. This is due to several composition differences between the two works:

  • Artist’s skill: it certainly appears as if the first image was produced by an artist with superior skill
  • Fame: for anyone who knows art history, the first image is famous while the other is not
  • Lasting quality: the first image has survived the test of time, remaining popular over two hundred years!
  • Meaning: the first image likely conjures deeper feelings, themes, or ideas, such as isolation and the primacy of nature. This is why this image has become the face of Romanticism.

But what about the images demonstrate the artists’ superior skills? While the second image appears to be produced with a simple doodle, and quickly composed, the first indicates more complexity, attention-to-detail, and craft. Freidrich leverages different colors, textures, shapes, and symbols to evoke a feeling in the viewer. Skilled artists will use different techniques, like the way they move the paintbrush, the pressure they exert or the direction of the brush. They will use textured paintbrushes for a specific effect, such as the difference between the light fluffy clouds and dark mountain rocks. They will use different color pallets to project, as accurately as possible, the feelings they are trying to evoke. In short, while anyone can paint, true artists leverage many different skills, techniques, and materials to render what is in their imagination into a real-life product.

So how does this relate to our attempts to define literature?

Literature is art, but with words.

While the artist uses different colors, paintbrushes, mediums, canvases, and techniques, the writer uses different genres and literary techniques called literary devices . Just like different types of paint, paintbrushes, and artistic tools, there are literally hundreds of literary devices, but some of the most common are metaphor, simile, personification, and imagery. Genre is the type or style of literature. Each genre has its own conventions. Literary genres include creative nonfiction, fiction, drama, and poetry . Works that are literary tend to masterfully use genre conventions and literary devices to create a world in the mind of the reader. Works that are less literary tend to be for practical and/or entertainment purposes, and the writer dedicates less focused energy towards artfully employing literary devices.

However, just because a work is not as literary as another does not mean it cannot be enjoyed. Just like a stick figure or cartoon character might be perfectly fine if intended for a particular audience or purpose, readers can still enjoy People Magazine even though it is not of the same literary quality as Hamlet .

So, to use an example from earlier:

While some literature falls into clear designations of literature or not literature, most works are open to debate. Given the sometimes difficult task of determining whether a work falls into one camp or the other, it may be more helpful to think of Literature less as a dichotomy than a spectrum, with popular magazines on one end and works like Hamlet and Beloved on the other, and most written works falling somewhere between the two extremes.

The Literary Spectrum

This spectrum can be a helpful way to think about literature because it provides a more open-ended way to discuss writing as art than simply labeling works as literary or not. After viewing the above chart, why do you think popular magazines and a Calculus textbook are considered "less literary"? In terms of popular magazines, they do not fit the definition of literature as "lasting" in the sense that they usually fade from relevancy quickly after publication. Additionally, the authors of such magazines are striving for quick entertainment rather than leaving a meaningful impression on the reader. They tend not to use literary devices, such as metaphor, in a masterful way. On the other end, Shakespeare's Hamlet definitely fits the definition of "lasting," in that it has survived hundreds of years. It is full of literary devices used for rhetorical effect and, one would argue, it touches upon deep themes such as death, the afterlife, murder, vengeance, and love, rather than trifling issues such as a starlet's most recent plastic surgery.

Certainly, works of literature are up for debate: that is the quintessential question literary scholars might ask. What makes certain literary works survive the test of time? What makes a story, poem, or drama "good"? While literary scholars are less interested in proving a certain work is "good" or not -- and more focused on analyzing the ways to illuminate a given work -- it can be helpful for you to consider what kinds of literature you like and why you like it. What about the way it was written causes you to feel the way you do about it?

Who Decides What is Literature?

Now that we have at least somewhat clarified the definition of literature, who decides what works are or are not literature? Historically speaking, kings, queens, publishers, literary critics, professors, colleges, and readers (like you!) have decided which works survive and which works do not.

Aristotle was one of the first writers to attempt to decide what works fall into the category of literature, and what works do not. While Aristotle was most famous for his contributions to science and philosophy, he is also considered one of the first literary critics. A literary critic is a person who studies and analyzes literature. A literary critic produces scholarship called literary criticism . An example of this would be Aristotle’s Poetics , in which he identifies the defining qualities of a “good” Tragedy. Aristotle’s analysis of Tragedy was so influential that it is still used today, over two thousand years later!

When a work is officially decided to constitute literature, it enters something called the Canon. Not to be confused with the large metal tube that shoots bombs popular in the 16th through the 19th centuries (cannon), the Literary Canon is a collection of works that are considered by the powers that be to constitute literature. A work that falls into this designation is called canonical. So, to use an example from Aristotle’s Poetics , Aristotle defined Sophocles’ Oedipus Trilogy as the pinnacle of the Tragic Genre. From there, in part due to Aristotle's influence, Greek society valued Oedipus so much that they kept discussing, reading, referencing, and teaching it. Thus, it became a kind of shining example of the Tragic Canon, one which has lasted thousands of years and continues to be read and lauded to this day. Other tragedies, fairly or not, are often judged on their quality in comparison to Sophocles' works. Wild to think that someone who died thousands of years ago still influences what we consider literature today!

Memes and Video Games: Today's Literature?

All this talk of thousands-of-years-old texts might seem out of touch. A lot of people think "old and boring" and literature are synonymous. Students are often surprised to hear that comic books and video games can arguably be considered literature, too. There are plenty of arguments to be made that comic books, such as Maus by Art Spiegalman (1991) or Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (2006) are literature. Cutting edge literary scholars argue video games like Kentucky Route Zero by Cardboard Computer (2015) can be considered literary. There is also literature that is published in tweets, like Jennifer Egan's "Black Box" (2012). Some might even consider memes literature!

Generative question: do you think memes can be literary?

chihuahua makes a dramatic face with superimposed text: "me, a writing professor: *assigns 500 word essay*; students: *dramatic chihuahua face*"

A meme is an image or video containing cultural values or ideas, often represented through allusion (implied reference to another work, without naming that work or its author). Memes can spread rapidly spreads through social media. Why? Because the best ones are #relatable; that is, they speak to a common human experience.

Usually memes take the form of text superimposed on an image. For example, the meme above conveys the dramatic reaction students sometimes give when I assign an essay. This is done primarily through a literary device called hyperbole , or exaggeration for rhetorical effect. It conveys its message comically through certain conventions that come along with the meme genre, such as the syntactic structure "me, a [insert noun]" and asterisks, which convey action. Just like in the Shakespearean drama, the colon indicates what each character (me and the students, in this case) is saying or doing. My chihuahua's face looks silly and very dramatic. Through this use of image, text, format, and convention, the meaning I intended to convey was that I was making fun of my students for being over-dramatic about what to me seems like a fairly simple assignment. While some might dismiss memes as shallow, when you start to unravel the layers of meaning, they can actually be very complex and even, dare I say, literary!

Think about a recent meme you have seen, or your favorite meme of all time. Imagine explaining this meme to someone who has no idea what it means. What is the message or idea behind the meme? What cultural reference points does it use to convey its message? In what ways might this meme be considered literature? How might this compare to a short poem, like a haiku?

Not Literature

Let's say you come to the conclusion that a meme, a gossip magazine, or the Twilight Series is not literary. Does that mean you have to feel guilty and give up reading it forever? Or that it is not "good"?

Just because a work is not literary does not mean it is "bad," that it does not have value, or that one cannot enjoy it. Indeed, there are plenty of examples of written works that are on the less literary side of the spectrum but are still fun and enriching to read. Joe Dirt i s not on the same artistic level of cinema as Schindler's List , but my husband still loves watching it. Nothing Taylor Swift has produced is as deep as Tupac Shakur's "Changes" (1992) or Mitski's "Last Words of a Shooting Star" (2014), but listening to Taylor Swift is my guilty pleasure. This is all to say that whether a text is literary or not is not as important as the methods of analyzing texts. In fact, texts which were excluded from literature are often argued into the literary canon through such analysis. Part of what makes analyzing literature so fun is that it means the definition of literature is always up for debate! This is especially important given the history of the canon.

The Problem with the Canon

In an ideal world, literature would be celebrated purely based on its artistic merit. Well-written works would last, poorly-written works would wither from public memory. However, that is not always the case. Works often achieve public prominence or survive based on qualities unrelated to skill or aesthetics, such as an author's fame, wealth, connections, or acceptance by the dominant culture. William Wordsworth, for example, was named Poet Laureate of England and has been taught as one of the "Big Six" major Romantic-era authors ever since. Indeed, he is accepted as part of the Romanticism literary canon. One would be hard-pressed to find a Literature anthology that does not feature William Wordsworth . However, how many people have read or heard of Dorothy Wordsworth , William Wordsworth's sister, who arguably depicted Romantic themes with equal skill and beauty? Or James Hogg, a Scottish contemporary of Wordsworth who was a lower-class shepherd? Similarly, while most readers have encountered F. Scott Fitzgerald or Edgar Allen Poe in their high school literature classes, how many have read Frederick Douglass in these same classes? In short, all artistic skill (arguably) considered equal, why do some authors predominantly feature in the Canon while others do not?

Let’s perform an experimental activity.

  • Find a piece of paper or a whiteboard. On this piece of paper or whiteboard, write down as many works of literature that you feel constitute “Big L Literature.” Perhaps they are works you read in high school, works which have been made into films, or works you have been taught or told are literary masterworks. Don’t turn the page until you have written them down. Try to think of at least 10, but a larger sample size is better. Once you are finished, continue to the next paragraph.
  • Alright, now look at your list. If you know the author of the literary texts you named, write their name next to the work. If you do not know the author, Google the information and write it down. Continue doing this until you have named the author of each work. Once you are finished, read on to the next paragraph.
  • Now, as uncomfortable as it seems, label the gender/race/age/presumed sexual orientation of the authors you listed. After you have categorized them to the best of your ability, consider the following questions:
  • What percentage of the authors are male?
  • What percentage of the authors are white?
  • What percentage of the authors are old/dead?
  • What patterns do you notice? Why do you think this is?

I have replicated this experiment dozens of times in the classroom, and, in most classes, the vast majority of what students have been taught are “Literary Masterworks” are written by (pardon my colloquialism) dead white males. Although, as time progresses, it seems there is increasing but not proportionate representation on average. For example, while women make up about half of the population, over 80% of the most popular novels were written by men ("Battle"). While there are many possible reasons for this discrepancy in representation (which could be the focus of an entire textbook), what does this mean for scholars of literature? For students? For instructors? For society?

As a cultural relic, similar to art, many scholars suggest literature is a reflection of the society which produces it. This includes positive aspects of society (championing values such as love, justice, and good triumphing over evil), but it can also reflect negative aspects of society (such as discrimination, racism, sexism, homophobia, historical lack of opportunity for marginalized authors).

For example, enslaved Africans were often prevented from learning to read and write as a form of control. When Phillis Wheatley published her book of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) she had to defend the fact that she wrote it, due to popularly held racist views that slaves were incapable of writing poetry. Later, Frederick Douglass wrote about how his enslavers banned him from reading and writing, as they realized "education and slavery were incompatible with each other" (Douglass). He later championed his learning to read and write as the means which conveyed him to freedom. However, even when trying to publish The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass ( 1845) his publishers were forced to prove that it was, in fact, an enslaved person who wrote the story and not a white man who wrote it for him. Slave owners actively attempted to keep this book from circulation as it threatened the institution of slavery upon which they depended. Indeed, to this day, Douglass' book continues to be banned in some prisons for its potential to incite revolution (Darby, Gilroy).

How could Black writers enter the canon en masse if they were not allowed to read or write? Or if they were forced to spend all of their waking hours working? And if those who had the means to read and write had to jump through absurd hoops just to have their works published? And if even those texts which were published were banned?

Similarly, throughout much of Western history, women have been discouraged from pursuing reading and writing, as it distracted from society's expectations for women to focus on motherly and household duties. Until the 1700s, women were not allowed to go to college. Even then, very few went: only the extremely wealthy. It was not until the 19th century that women attended college in representative numbers. Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One's Own that if there are fewer works of literature written by women, it is only because society, historically, has not given women the time, education, funding, or space to do so. In this extended essay, she describes an imaginary sister of William Shakespeare who could have been just as great of a writer had she the same opportunities as her brother.

I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee's life of the poet. She died young—alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross-roads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her.

Woolf argues that in our time those who have been excluded from literature can now join the canon by adding their voices. The inequity of representation in literature -- which has arguably improved, but in many ways persists today -- can be remedied if more people from a wide array of backgrounds and walks of life are empowered to study and create Literature. That is one reason why the current study of literature is so exciting. As a student and budding literary scholar, you have the power to influence culture through your reading and analysis of literature! For one author and scholar's perspective on this topic, please watch this the following TED Talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to see the ways in which such misrepresentations are harmful, and why it is important to veer away from the historically parochial Canon into what Chinua Achebe calls "a balance of stories" (qtd. Bacon).

screen capture of a TED Talk video of "The Danger of a Single Story" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Link to transcript and video.

  • Original video available on TED Talk website
  • Transcript of video

What "single stories" do you know? What are the "single stories" people have told about you? What story would you tell if you could? What kinds of stories do you want to read? Throughout this class, you will get the opportunity to encounter many different voices and stories from all over the world. While we faced hurdles of copyright permissions, the authors of this textbook attempted to embody the values espoused in this TED Talk & Chinua Achebe's conception of the "balance of stories." As you read the textbook, consider the stories which were omitted, why they were omitted, and what works of Literature you would include in this class if you could.

Works Cited

Bacon, Katie. "An African Voice." The Atlantic , 2000.

"Battle of the Authors: Are The Most Popular Rated Fiction Books Written by Men or Women?" Wordery , 1 Mar. 2019.

Darby, Luke. "Illinois Prison Bans Frederick Douglass's Memoir and Other "Racial" Books." GQ , 20 August 2019.

Douglass, Frederick. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. 1845.

Friedrich, Caspar David. "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog." Hamburger Kunsthalle Museum , 1818.

Gilroy, Paul. "Banned Books of Guantánamo: 'An American Slave' by Frederick Douglass." Vice , 14 Nov. 2014.

"literature, n.; 3b & 5" OED Online , Oxford University Press, September 2019, www.oed.com/view/Entry/109080. Accessed 6 September 2019.

Rollison, David. "Big L vs Little L Literature." Survey of World Literature I. College of Marin, 2008. Lecture.

Wheatley, Phillis. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral . 1773.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. 1929.

How Scientific and Technical Information Works

  • Introduction to the Ecosystem

An Information Timeline

  • Primary Sources
  • Secondary Sources
  • Tertiary or Reference Sources
  • Popular (vs. Scholarly) Sources
  • Peer Review
  • Search Strategies
  • How to Evaluate Information
  • Cite Sources
  • Citation Management Software This link opens in a new window

In science, technology, engineering, and math, things are always happening. New ideas, unexpected experimental results, incremental achievements and landmark discoveries. One way we like to categorize the information that is produced in order to document, analyze, and integrate an Event is based on their proximity to that Event: "Primary," "Secondary," and "Tertiary" literature. An Event, a reaction to the Event, and a summary of the Event.

what is the literature source

 We value primary literature because it gets us as close as possible to the Event itself. We value secondary literature because it provides us with commentary, analysis, critique, and contextualization of the Event. We value tertiary literature because it distills the Event and its aftermath down to a short, authoritative entry that helps us quickly understand what happened.

what is the literature source

Primary sources bring us the closest we're ever likely to get to most new research and theoretical work in STEM. These publications document experiments, observations, discoveries, new modes of analysis, and new research methods, and they are written by the people most directly involved. While peer reviewed articles in scholarly journals are the most common and well-known source of primarily literature in STEM, it can be found in a variety of formats. If your professor asks you to find a primary source for class, this is probably what they're looking for. Below are the most common types of primary research publications you are likely to encounter.

Peer Reviewed Research Articles

Research articles are extensive and detailed descriptions of scientific experiments, observations, and analysis carried out by the authors. (Learn more about peer review in the "What is Peer Review?" tab to your left.) These articles are published in peer-reviewed journals, or occasionally as chapters in edited scholarly books. They are the primary way that most scientists learn about advances in their fields. If an article is very influential in its field, or at least very interesting or surprising, it is likely to be cited in the publications of other scientists working in the same areas, and perhaps analyzed, critiqued, or commented on in a secondary work of literature.

Conference Proceedings

Conference proceedings are often “works in progress” originally meant to accompany the author’s lecture or poster at a conference. They are not always peer reviewed to the same extent as articles. The author may have later published a longer article in a scholarly journal based on the conference proceeding. Conference proceedings are a primary mode of information sharing in some fields, such as computer science and engineering, physics, and mathematics.

Preprints are early versions of articles which have not been through a peer review process yet, but which the authors want their colleagues in the field to have access to anyways. Preprints help to facilitate more rapid sharing of information, for example during a pandemic, but they are also valuable ways for authors to receive feedback on their work prior to publication. These can be great sources of cutting edge information, but it’s important to remember that they still haven't completed the publication process, and the final version of the article will likely be different.

Dissertations and Theses

Dissertations are written by doctoral students as the culminating evidence of their studies in graduate school. They are meant to be an original contribution of research to the author’s field. Dissertations are reviewed carefully by a committee of university faculty before a degree is awarded. While a full dissertation is often book-length, many authors will also opt to publish parts of it as research articles.

A patent is a legal document providing evidence of intellectual copyright over an invention (usually a product, process, method, or composition), allowing the patent holder to exclude others from making, using, or selling the invention for a period of time. Patents include original evidence describing the invention, and are thus often considered primary. Once published by the US Patent and Trademark Office, they are freely available, although often difficult to locate.

Internal Reports and other "Grey Literature"

Individual organizations produce a great quantity of original material documenting their operations that is never formally published. This is commonly referred to as “grey literature.” Grey literature that could be considered primary might include internal reports, technical documents, memos, and personal communications.

This section includes original data collected in the course of research projects. “Raw” implies the data hasn’t yet been cleaned up or manipulated. This includes numerical data, tables and charts, code, maps, transcripts, photos and drawings, lab and field notebooks, sound recordings, and even material samples. Raw data is sometimes shared by researchers who value open science, but this isn’t yet a norm.

what is the literature source

Secondary sources are a step away from the Events that primary sources document. Generally, these sources are commenting on, analyzing, interpreting, or evaluating primary sources. These types of sources help researchers contextualize what's happening in their field, and they can contribute to the direction of primary research by identifying longer-term trends and implications. In college, many of the papers and articles that students produce are secondary sources.

Review Articles

Reviews are a genre of article or book chapter which present an overview of the current state of research on a particular topic. The authors identify and analyze the most important discoveries, trends, and publications on that topic. There are different types of reviews that are prevalent in particular fields. Additionally, there are review journals that exclusively publish peer-reviewed review articles, and many edited scholarly books are collections of review articles.

Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis

Systematic reviews, which are most common to medical and health sciences, are a specific type of review article that attempts to answer a research question by systematically aggregating and reviewing the data from large numbers of existing primary research articles on a topic. Meta-analysis is a common statistical analysis used in systematic reviews.

Annotated Bibliographies and Other Types of Literature Reviews

Annotated bibliographies are a highly stylized form of literature review. Rather than being written as a single narrative, they present a list of sources (a bibliography) on a topic, and provide review and analysis (annotation) for each source as it relates to the theme of the bibliography. Other types of literature reviews are more likely to put selected sources into conversation with each other, by comparing and contrasting them together in an essay format rather than considering each individually.

Monographs (Books)

Most, but not all, nonfiction scholarly books that are written entirely by one or two people (as opposed to edited volumes where each chapter is by a separate author) are works of secondary literature whose purpose is to provide commentary, analysis, and critique on a theme or topic. The authors are not reporting on new information they have discovered, but they are adding to the field with their intellectual examination of existing information.

what is the literature source

Information that is confirmed through the scientific process and through the vigorous debate played out in the literature eventually comes to be considered consensus knowledge. This type of knowledge is published in tertiary, or reference sources, whose main purpose is to present established information on a topic in easily digestible form, where it can be quickly referred to as people are working.

Encyclopedias

The purpose of an encyclopedia is to provide readers with a brief overview of established knowledge in a field. There is minimal analysis and no new information is being reported. Encyclopedias can vary widely in scope, from massive encyclopedias of everything, such as Wikipedia, to niche encyclopedias covering specific fields, such as the Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology.

Dictionaries

Dictionaries exist to provide consensus definitions of words and phrases. There are many language dictionaries, which attempt to define every word in a language, and are usually pretty large. There are also smaller subject dictionaries that attempt to provide definitions of field-specific terminology, such as the Dictionary of Materials Science.

Textbooks are not usually written either to present wholly new information to the world, or to provide analysis or critical interrogation to existing information. The purpose of textbooks is to inform and educate students on the current state of knowledge in an area.

Property Data Handbooks and Indexes

Handbooks and other tools that provide chemical property data are invaluable reference sources for chemists and other scientists who need chemical information. The data is originally discovered and published in the primary literature, but once established it is collated and presented in these handbooks and indexes where it can quickly be found and referred to as chemists are working.

Databases, Bibliographies, and Concordances

These are not "sources" in the same sense as the other sources on this list, but they are all tools that allow us to locate primary and secondary literature. In that sense, many consider databases et al to be honorary tertiary sources.

what is the literature source

Most information is not scholarly information, of course. Most published information is meant for a wider audience than one's peers in biotoxicology. So when we talk about information as "popular" instead of scholarly, we're simply referring to information that's meant for a bigger audience. This includes scientific writing! A short list of popular literature:

  • Books about astronomy that you could find in an average bookstore, often with eye-catching enhanced Hubble Telescope photos on the cover
  • Scientific American, Sky and Telescope, and Popular Mechanics magazines
  • MIT Technology Review
  • Articles in the newspaper reporting on specific research studies

If you aren't sure whether something is popular or scholarly, think about:

  • Is the author a scientist themselves? Scientists do sometimes write for larger audiences, but journalists do not write scientific literature.
  • the writing style: it'll be clearer, you won't need a special dictionary to get through a paragraph, and it'll be written to keep you engaged. It may even be funny or conversational.
  • are there engaging visuals involved? A beautiful or stylish cover for a book, interesting graphics to accompany articles? Scholarly articles rarely include decorative images.

Basically, if the audience is scholarly, and the purpose is to inform the audience of new research in their fields, it's scholarly. If the audience is anyone who happens to pick up a book or magazine, it's popular.

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  • URL: https://researchguides.gonzaga.edu/STEMinformationliteracy

Agriculture and Bioresources 492/494: Tutorials for Finding and Evaluating Information Sources

  • 1.1 Characteristics of Scholarly, Grey, and Popular Literature
  • 1.2 The Scholarly Conversation
  • 1.3 Evaluating Online Sources Quickly
  • 1.4 Determining the Quality of Information
  • 2.1 Deconstructing Your Thesis Topic
  • 2.2 Search Strategies and Techniques
  • 2.3 Which Search Tools Best Meet Your Needs?
  • 2.4 Reference Tracking to Extend Your Search
  • 2.5 Documenting Search Strategies and Managing Sources
  • Short Feedback Survey

Scholarly, Grey, and Popular Information Sources

So, what do you know about scholarly, grey, and popular information sources? Does the popular just have lots of friends? Is the grey getting a seniors discount? If you do know about these types of info, then the following will be familiar. Being able to distinguish between the different types of information sources is essential when looking for material for your literature review.  

What is Scholarly literature?

Scholarly literature sources are written by experts in a field. They use technical and academic language, and they are usually written for other experts. These sources are also known as academic sources, peer-reviewed sources, or refereed sources. They are usually research articles published in scholarly journals (in print or electronically).  

What is Grey Literature?

This type of information source is not created through traditional commercial publishing channels. It is material that is written and produced by government, academics, business, industry, and more. It can be found in print or electronically. Examples include annual reports, policy statements, geological surveys, and company newsletters.  

What is Popular Literature?

This type of information source is written for the everyday person and is informal in tone and scope. It is not written for an academic audience. Popular works include general news, entertainment, and business publications such as The Atlantic , People , and Fortune . Some of these sources can look like scholarly sources, i.e. National Geographic , Scientific American , or Psychology Today . Popular literature can be found online or in print.  

What are Peer Reviewed Sources of Information?

Before we get to the specific characteristics of the various types of literature, let’s look at peer-review. It is a major difference between the three types of sources, so it helps to know what it is. In most cases, peer-reviewed journal articles are considered the highest standard for scientific research. It’s important to note that while all peer-reviewed sources are scholarly, not all scholarly sources are peer-reviewed. To make sure we’re all on the same page as to what peer review is, watch this short video for an overview:

Source: " Peer Review in 3 Minutes " by libncsu is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license

Characteristics of Scholarly, Grey, and Popular Information

Scholarly, grey, and popular information have different (but sometimes overlapping) characteristics. It is useful to know the characteristics so you can determine what a piece of information is in order to be able to include it in your thesis. While most of the information you need will be of the scholarly variety, AgBio students often look to the grey literature for information on data and statistics, government policy, or industry or market research. If you come across a popular article that talks about a research study, it is best to try to find the original scholarly, peer-reviewed study to include in your work. If you need help with any of this, your librarian can assist you.

Review the following table that depicts the characteristics of all three types of information:

Table of characteristics depicting all three types of information.

Take a Quiz!

  • Scholarly, Grey, or Popular? This self-assessment quiz will give you some practice on deciding what is scholarly literature, what is grey literature, and what is a popular source of information. This is not a graded quiz, and no one will see your answers but you!
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Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Sources

Search catalog, what are the differences.

Sources of information or evidence are often categorized as primary, secondary, or tertiary material. These classifications are based on the originality of the material and the proximity of the source or origin. This informs the reader as to whether the author is reporting information that is first hand or is conveying the experiences and opinions of others which is considered second hand. Determining if a source is primary, secondary or tertiary can be tricky. Below you will find a description of the three categories of information and examples to help you make a determination.

Primary Sources

These sources are records of events or evidence as they are first described or actually happened without any interpretation or commentary. It is information that is shown for the first time or original materials on which other research is based.  Primary sources display original thinking, report on new discoveries, or share fresh information.

Secondary Sources

These sources offer an analysis or restatement of primary sources. They often try to describe or explain primary sources. They tend to be works which summarize, interpret, reorganize, or otherwise provide an added value to a primary source.

Tertiary Sources

These are sources that index, abstract, organize, compile, or digest other sources. Some reference materials and textbooks are considered tertiary sources when their chief purpose is to list, summarize or simply repackage ideas or other information. Tertiary sources are usually not credited to a particular author.

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Research Method

Home » What is Literature – Definition, Types, Examples

What is Literature – Definition, Types, Examples

Table of Contents

What is Literature

Definition:

Literature refers to written works of imaginative, artistic, or intellectual value, typically characterized by the use of language to convey ideas, emotions, and experiences. It encompasses various forms of written expression, such as novels, poems, plays, essays, short stories, and other literary works.

History of Literature

The history of literature spans thousands of years and includes works from many different cultures and languages. Here is a brief overview of some of the major periods and movements in the history of literature:

Ancient Literature (3000 BCE – 500 CE)

  • Ancient Mesopotamian Literature (3000 BCE – 2000 BCE): This period includes the earliest known writings, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, a Sumerian epic poem that explores themes of friendship, mortality, and the search for immortality.
  • Ancient Greek Literature (800 BCE – 200 BCE): This era produced works by legendary writers such as Homer, known for the Iliad and the Odyssey, and playwrights like Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides, who wrote tragic plays exploring human nature and the conflicts between gods and mortals.
  • Ancient Roman Literature (200 BCE – 500 CE): Roman literature included works by poets like Virgil (known for the Aeneid) and historians like Livy and Tacitus, who chronicled the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.

Medieval Literature (500 CE – 1500 CE)

  • Early Medieval Literature (500 CE – 1000 CE): During this period, literature was mainly religious and included works such as Beowulf, an Old English epic poem, and The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, an Italian epic poem that describes the journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.
  • High Medieval Literature (1000 CE – 1300 CE): This era saw the emergence of troubadour poetry in Provence, France, which celebrated courtly love, as well as the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, such as The Canterbury Tales, which combined diverse stories and social commentary.
  • Late Medieval Literature (1300 CE – 1500 CE): Notable works from this period include Dante’s Divine Comedy, Petrarch’s sonnets, and the works of Christine de Pizan, an early feminist writer.

Renaissance Literature (14th – 17th centuries)

  • Italian Renaissance Literature (14th – 16th centuries): This period witnessed the flourishing of humanism and produced works by authors such as Francesco Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio, who emphasized the individual, the secular, and the revival of classical themes and styles.
  • English Renaissance Literature (16th – 17th centuries): This era saw the works of William Shakespeare, including his plays such as Hamlet and Macbeth, which explored complex human emotions and the human condition. Other notable writers include Christopher Marlowe and Edmund Spenser.

Enlightenment Literature (17th – 18th centuries)

  • This period marked a shift towards reason, rationality, and the questioning of established beliefs and systems. Influential writers during this time included René Descartes, John Locke, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Denis Diderot.

Romanticism (late 18th – mid-19th centuries)

  • Romantic literature emphasized individual emotion, imagination, and nature. Key figures include William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats.

Victorian Literature (19th century)

  • This era was characterized by the reign of Queen Victoria and featured writers such as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, and Oscar Wilde.

Modernist Literature (late 19th – early 20th centuries)

  • Modernist literature emerged as a response to the social, political, and technological changes of the time. It is characterized by experimentation with narrative structure, language, and perspective. Notable modernist writers include T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust.

Postmodern Literature (mid-20th century – present)

  • Postmodern literature challenges traditional notions of narrative and reality. It often incorporates elements of metafiction, intertextuality, and fragmented narratives. Prominent postmodern authors include Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Salman Rushdie, and Margaret Atwood.

Contemporary Literature (late 20th century – present)

  • Contemporary literature encompasses a wide range of diverse voices and styles. It explores various themes and addresses contemporary issues, reflecting the cultural, social, and political contexts of the present time. Notable contemporary authors include Toni Morrison, J.K. Rowling, Haruki Murakami, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Zadie Smith.

Types of Literature

Types of Literature are as follows:

Short story

Graphic novel, electronic literature.

Poetry is a form of literature that uses language to convey emotions or ideas in a concise and often rhythmic manner. Poetry has been around for centuries, with many different cultures creating their own unique styles. While some people may view poetry as difficult to understand, there is often great beauty in its simplicity. Whether you are looking to read poems for enjoyment or to better analyze literary works, understanding the basics of poetry can be very helpful.

Examples of Poetry in Literature

There are countless examples of poetry in literature, ranging from ancient works to contemporary masterpieces. Here are just a few examples:

  • “ The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ” by T.S. Eliot (1915): This modernist poem explores themes of alienation, identity, and the human condition.
  • “ Do not go gentle into that good night ” by Dylan Thomas (1951): This villanelle is a powerful meditation on death and the struggle for survival.
  • “ The Waste Land” by T.S. Eliot (1922) : This epic poem is a complex and multi-layered exploration of the modern world and its spiritual emptiness.
  • “ The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe (1845) : This famous poem is a haunting and macabre exploration of grief, loss, and the supernatural.
  • “ Sonnet 18″ by William Shakespeare (1609) : This classic sonnet is a beautiful and romantic tribute to the beauty of the beloved.
  • “ Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats (1819) : This ode is a sublime exploration of the power of beauty and the transcendent experience of art.
  • “ The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost (1916) : This famous poem is a contemplative meditation on choices, regrets, and the uncertainties of life.

These are just a few examples of the many works of poetry that exist in literature. Poetry can explore a wide range of themes and emotions, using language and imagery to create powerful and moving works of art.

Prose is a type of written language that typically contains dialogue and narration. In literature, prose is the most common form of writing. Prose can be found in novels, short stories, plays, and essays.

Examples of Prose in Literature

“ The Essays” by Michel de Montaigne (1580) – This collection of prose is a seminal work of the French Renaissance and is credited with popularizing the use of personal reflections in prose literature. Montaigne’s writing style in these works is informal and conversational, and covers a vast range of topics including morality, philosophy, religion, and politics. The prose is notable for its intimacy and personal nature, as Montaigne often uses his own experiences and thoughts to illustrate his ideas.

A novel is a fictional book that is typically longer than 300 pages. It tells a story, usually in chronological order, and has characters and settings that are developed over the course of the story. Novels are often divided into chapters, which help to break up the story and make it easier to read.

Novels are one of the most popular genres of literature, and there are many different types of novels that you can read. Whether you’re looking for a romance novel, a mystery novel, or a historical fiction novel, there’s sure to be a book out there that you’ll love.

Examples of Novels in Literature

  • “Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes (1605) – This novel is considered one of the greatest works of Spanish literature and is a satirical take on chivalric romance. It follows the adventures of a delusional knight, Don Quixote, and his loyal squire, Sancho Panza.
  • “Robinson Crusoe” by Daniel Defoe (1719) – This novel is considered one of the earliest examples of the English novel and is a tale of survival and self-reliance. It follows the story of a man named Robinson Crusoe, who is stranded on a deserted island for 28 years.
  • “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen (1813) – This novel is considered one of the greatest works of English literature and is a romantic comedy of manners. It follows the story of Elizabeth Bennet and her complicated relationship with Mr. Darcy, a wealthy landowner.
  • “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee (1960) – This novel is a classic of American literature and deals with issues of race, class, and justice in the American South during the 1930s. It follows the story of a young girl named Scout and her experiences with racism and prejudice.
  • “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925) – This novel is considered a masterpiece of American literature and is a social commentary on the decadence and excess of the Roaring Twenties. It follows the story of Jay Gatsby, a wealthy and mysterious man, and his obsession with a woman named Daisy Buchanan.

A novella is a work of fiction that is shorter than a novel but longer than a short story. The word “novella” comes from the Italian word for “new”, which is fitting because this type of story is often seen as being between the old and the new. In terms of length, a novella typically has about 20,000 to 40,000 words.

While novels are usually about one main plot with several subplots, novellas are usually focused on one central conflict. This conflict is usually resolved by the end of the story. However, because novellas are longer than short stories, there is more room to develop characters and explore themes in depth.

Examples of Novella in Literature

  • “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad (1899) – This novella is a powerful and haunting portrayal of European imperialism in Africa. It follows the journey of a steamboat captain named Marlow, who is sent to find a man named Kurtz deep in the Congo.
  • “The Old Man and the Sea” by Ernest Hemingway (1952) – This novella is a Pulitzer Prize-winning story of an aging Cuban fisherman named Santiago and his epic struggle to catch a giant marlin. It is a testament to the resilience and determination of the human spirit.
  • “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka (1915) – This novella is a surreal and disturbing tale of a man named Gregor Samsa, who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect. It explores themes of isolation, identity, and the human condition.
  • “Of Mice and Men” by John Steinbeck (1937) – This novella is a tragic story of two migrant workers, George and Lennie, who dream of owning their own farm but are thwarted by their own limitations and the harsh realities of the Great Depression. It is a powerful commentary on the American Dream and the plight of the working class.
  • “Animal Farm” by George Orwell (1945) – This novella is a satirical allegory of the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalinism. It follows the story of a group of farm animals who overthrow their human owner and create their own society, only to be corrupted by their own leaders. It is a cautionary tale about the dangers of totalitarianism and propaganda.

A short story is a work of fiction that typically can be read in one sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents.

The short story is one of the oldest forms of literature and has been found in oral cultures as well as in written form. In terms of length, it is much shorter than the novel, typically ranging from 1,000 to 20,000 words.

The short story has often been described as a “perfect form” because it allows for greater compression and variety than either the novel or poem. It also allows writers to experiment with different styles and genres.

Examples of Short Story in Literature

  • “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe (1843) – This classic horror story is a chilling portrayal of a murderer who is haunted by the sound of his victim’s heartbeat. It is a masterful example of Poe’s psychological and suspenseful writing style.
  • “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson (1948) – This controversial short story is a commentary on the dark side of human nature and the dangers of blind adherence to tradition. It follows the annual tradition of a small town that holds a lottery, with a surprising and shocking ending.
  • “The Gift of the Magi” by O. Henry (1905) – This heartwarming story is a classic example of a holiday tale of selflessness and sacrifice. It follows the story of a young couple who each give up their most prized possession to buy a gift for the other.
  • “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” by Ernest Hemingway (1933) – This minimalist story is a reflection on the existential angst and loneliness of modern life. It takes place in a cafe late at night and explores the relationships between the patrons and the waiter.
  • “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892) – This feminist short story is a powerful critique of the medical establishment and the treatment of women’s mental health. It follows the story of a woman who is confined to her bedroom and becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper on the walls.

A graphic novel is a book that tells a story through the use of illustrations and text. Graphic novels can be based on true stories, or they can be fictional. They are usually longer than traditional books, and they often have more complex plots.

Graphic novels first gained popularity in the 1970s, when publishers began releasing collections of comics that had been previously published in magazines. Since then, the genre has grown to include original works, as well as adaptations ofexisting stories.

Graphic novels are now widely respected as a form of literature, and they have been adapted into many different mediums, including movies, television shows, and stage plays.

Examples of Graphic Novels in Literature

  • “ Watchmen” by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1986-1987) – This graphic novel is considered one of the greatest works of the medium and is a deconstruction of the superhero genre. It follows a group of retired superheroes who come out of retirement to investigate the murder of one of their own.
  • “ Maus” by Art Spiegelman (1980-1991) – This Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel is a harrowing and poignant account of a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust and his strained relationship with his son. The characters are depicted as animals, with the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats.
  • “ Persepolis” by Marjane Satrapi (2000-2003) – This autobiographical graphic novel is a coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution. It follows the author’s experiences growing up in Iran and then moving to Europe as a teenager.
  • “Sandman” by Neil Gaiman (1989-1996) – This epic fantasy series is a masterful exploration of mythology, literature, and human nature. It follows the story of Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams, as he navigates through the world of dreams and interacts with characters from across time and space.
  • “Batman: The Dark Knight Returns” by Frank Miller (1986) – This influential graphic novel is a gritty and realistic portrayal of an aging Batman who comes out of retirement to fight crime in a dystopian future. It is credited with revolutionizing the Batman character and inspiring a new era of darker and more mature superhero stories.

Electronic literature, also known as e-literature, is a genre of writing that uses electronic media to create works of art. This type of literature often includes elements of interactivity, hypertextuality, and multimedia.

E-literature has its roots in early computer games and interactive fiction. These early works were created using simple text-based programming languages like BASIC and HTML. Today, e-literature has evolved into a complex form of art that incorporates multimedia elements such as audio and video.

Examples of Electronic Literature in Literature

  • “ Afternoon: A Story” by Michael Joyce (1987) – This hypertext fiction is considered one of the earliest examples of electronic literature. It is a nonlinear narrative that can be read in multiple paths and contains multimedia elements like images and sound.
  • “ Patchwork Girl” by Shelley Jackson (1995) – This hypertext novel is a retelling of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” that uses digital media to explore the themes of identity, gender, and creation. It contains animated graphics, video, and sound.
  • “ The Dreamlife of Letters” by Brian Kim Stefans (2000) – This work of interactive poetry uses computer algorithms to generate new poems based on the user’s input. It combines traditional poetic forms with digital technologies to create a unique reading experience.
  • “ Flight Paths” by Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph (2007) – This work of electronic literature is a collaborative multimedia project that explores the lives of immigrants and refugees. It combines text, video, and audio to create an immersive and interactive experience.
  • “Inanimate Alice” by Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph (2005-2016) – This interactive digital novel follows the story of a young girl named Alice as she grows up in a world of technology and media. It uses a combination of text, video, animation, and sound to create a unique and engaging narrative.

Non-fiction

Non-fiction in literature is defined as prose writings that are based on real events, people, or places. Non-fiction is often divided into categories such as biography, history, and essay.

Examples of Non-fiction in Literature

  • “ The Origin of Species” by Charles Darwin (1859) – This landmark book is one of the most influential works in the history of science. It lays out Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and provides evidence for the descent of all living things from a common ancestor.
  • “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” by Malcolm X and Alex Haley (1965) – This autobiography is a candid and powerful account of Malcolm X’s life as an African American civil rights leader. It explores his journey from a troubled youth to a powerful orator and activist, and provides insights into the social and political climate of the time.
  • “ The Feminine Mystique” by Betty Friedan (1963) – This groundbreaking book is a seminal work of feminist literature. It critiques the idea of the “happy housewife” and argues that women’s social roles and expectations are limiting and oppressive.
  • “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander (2010) – This book is a powerful critique of the criminal justice system and its impact on communities of color. It argues that the system perpetuates racial inequality and provides a call to action for reform.

Drama is a genre of literature that tells a story through the use of dialogue and action. It often has a strong plot and characters who undergo change or development over the course of the story. Drama can be divided into several subgenres, such as tragedy, comedy, and farce.

Examples of Drama in Literature

  • “ Hamlet” by William Shakespeare (1603) – This tragedy is considered one of the greatest plays ever written. It tells the story of Prince Hamlet of Denmark and his quest for revenge against his uncle, who murdered his father and married his mother.
  • “ A Doll’s House” by Henrik Ibsen (1879) – This play is a landmark work of modern drama. It explores themes of gender roles, marriage, and personal identity through the story of a married woman who decides to leave her husband and children in order to discover herself.
  • “ Death of a Salesman” by Arthur Miller (1949) – This play is a powerful critique of the American Dream and the pressures of modern society. It tells the story of a salesman named Willy Loman and his family, as they struggle to come to terms with the realities of their lives.
  • “ Fences” by August Wilson (1985) – This play is part of Wilson’s “Pittsburgh Cycle,” a series of ten plays that explore the African American experience in the 20th century. It tells the story of a former Negro League baseball player named Troy Maxson and his relationship with his family.

Also see Literature Review

Examples of Literature

Examples of Literature are as follows:

  • “The Silent Patient” by Alex Michaelides
  • “Normal People” by Sally Rooney
  • “Where the Crawdads Sing” by Delia Owens
  • “The Water Dancer” by Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” by J.K. Rowling, Jack Thorne, and John Tiffany
  • “The Ferryman” by Jez Butterworth
  • “The Inheritance” by Matthew Lopez
  • “Sweat” by Lynn Nottage
  • “The Hill We Climb” by Amanda Gorman (inaugural poem at the 2021 U.S. presidential inauguration)
  • “The Tradition” by Jericho Brown
  • “Homie” by Danez Smith
  • “The Carrying” by Ada Limón
  • “Call Me by Your Name” (2017) directed by Luca Guadagnino (based on the novel by André Aciman)
  • “The Great Gatsby” (2013) directed by Baz Luhrmann (based on the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald)
  • “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy (2001-2003) directed by Peter Jackson (based on the novels by J.R.R. Tolkien)
  • “The Handmaiden” (2016) directed by Park Chan-wook (based on the novel “Fingersmith” by Sarah Waters)
  • “Lemonade” (2016) by Beyoncé (visual album with accompanying poetry and prose)
  • “To Pimp a Butterfly” (2015) by Kendrick Lamar (rap album with dense lyrical storytelling)
  • “I See You” (2017) by The xx (album inspired by themes of love and connection)
  • “Carrie & Lowell” (2015) by Sufjan Stevens (folk album exploring personal and familial themes)
  • Blogs and online articles that discuss literary analysis, book reviews, and creative writing
  • Online literary magazines and journals publishing contemporary works of fiction, poetry, and essays
  • E-books and audiobooks available on platforms like Kindle, Audible, and Scribd
  • Social media platforms where writers share their works and engage with readers, such as Twitter and Instagram

Purpose of Literature

The purpose of literature is multifaceted and can vary depending on the author, genre, and intended audience. However, some common purposes of literature include:

Entertainment

Literature can provide enjoyment and pleasure to readers through engaging stories, complex characters, and beautiful language.

Literature can teach readers about different cultures, time periods, and perspectives, expanding their knowledge and understanding of the world.

Reflection and introspection

Literature can encourage readers to reflect on their own experiences and beliefs, prompting self-discovery and personal growth.

Social commentary

Literature can serve as a medium for social criticism, addressing issues such as inequality, injustice, and oppression.

Historical and cultural preservation

Literature can document and preserve the history, traditions, and values of different cultures and societies, providing insight into the past.

Aesthetic appreciation:

literature can be appreciated for its beauty and artistic value, inspiring readers with its language, imagery, and symbolism.

The Significance of Literature

Literature holds immense significance in various aspects of human life and society. It serves as a powerful tool for communication, expression, and exploration of ideas. Here are some of the key significances of literature:

Communication and Expression

Literature allows individuals to communicate their thoughts, emotions, and experiences across time and space. Through various literary forms such as novels, poems, plays, and essays, writers can convey their ideas and perspectives to readers, fostering understanding and empathy.

Cultural Reflection

Literature often reflects the values, beliefs, and experiences of a particular culture or society. It provides insights into different historical periods, social structures, and cultural practices, offering a glimpse into the diversity and richness of human experiences.

Knowledge and Education

Literature is a valuable source of knowledge, as it presents ideas, concepts, and information in an engaging and accessible manner. It introduces readers to different subjects, such as history, science, philosophy, psychology, and more, allowing them to expand their understanding and broaden their intellectual horizons.

Emotional and Intellectual Development

Literature has the power to evoke emotions and provoke critical thinking. By immersing oneself in literary works, readers can develop a deeper understanding of complex emotions, empathy for diverse perspectives, and the ability to think critically and analytically.

Preservation of Cultural Heritage

Literature acts as a repository of a society’s cultural heritage. It preserves the history, traditions, myths, and folklore of a particular community, ensuring that future generations can connect with their roots and learn from the experiences of the past.

Social Commentary and Critique

Literature often serves as a platform for social commentary and critique. Writers use their works to shed light on social issues, challenge societal norms, and promote positive change. By addressing controversial topics and presenting alternative viewpoints, literature can spark discussions and inspire activism.

Entertainment and Escapism

Literature offers a means of entertainment and escapism from the realities of everyday life. Engaging narratives, compelling characters, and vivid descriptions transport readers to different worlds, allowing them to experience joy, excitement, and adventure through the pages of a book.

Imagination and Creativity

Literature fuels the human imagination and nurtures creativity. It encourages readers to think beyond the boundaries of their own experiences, envision new possibilities, and explore alternative realities. Literature inspires writers to craft unique stories and ideas, contributing to the expansion of artistic expression.

Personal Growth and Self-Reflection

Reading literature can have a profound impact on personal growth and self-reflection. It provides opportunities for introspection, introspection, and self-discovery, as readers identify with characters, grapple with moral dilemmas, and contemplate the deeper meaning of life and existence.

The Enduring Impact of Literature

Literature has an enduring impact that transcends time and continues to influence individuals and societies long after it is written. Here are some ways in which literature leaves a lasting impression:

Cultural Legacy:

Literary works become part of a society’s cultural legacy. They shape and reflect the values, beliefs, and traditions of a particular era or community. Classic works of literature, such as Shakespeare’s plays or the novels of Jane Austen, continue to be studied, performed, and celebrated, preserving their impact across generations.

Influence on Other Art Forms:

Literature has a profound influence on other art forms, such as film, theater, music, and visual arts. Many famous literary works have been adapted into films or stage productions, reaching new audiences and extending their influence beyond the written word. Artists and musicians often draw inspiration from literary themes, characters, and narratives, further amplifying their impact.

Shaping Worldviews:

Literature has the power to shape and challenge worldviews. Through stories, ideas, and perspectives presented in literary works, readers are exposed to different cultures, experiences, and ideologies. This exposure fosters empathy, broadens perspectives, and encourages critical thinking, ultimately influencing how individuals perceive and understand the world around them.

Inspirational Source:

Literature serves as an inspirational source for individuals in various fields. Writers, artists, scientists, and thinkers often draw inspiration from the works of literary giants who have explored the depths of human emotions, grappled with existential questions, or challenged societal norms. Literature provides a wellspring of ideas and creativity that continues to fuel innovation and intellectual discourse.

Social and Political Change:

Literature has played a significant role in driving social and political change throughout history. Many literary works have addressed pressing social issues, advocated for human rights, and challenged oppressive systems. By shedding light on societal injustices and encouraging readers to question the status quo, literature has been instrumental in inspiring activism and fostering social progress.

Universal Themes and Human Experience:

Literature explores universal themes and the complexities of the human experience. Whether it’s love, loss, identity, or the pursuit of meaning, these themes resonate with readers across time and cultures. Literary works offer insights into the depths of human emotions, dilemmas, and aspirations, creating a shared understanding and connecting individuals across generations.

Intellectual and Personal Development:

Reading literature stimulates intellectual growth and personal development. It encourages critical thinking, analytical skills, and the ability to empathize with diverse perspectives. Literary works challenge readers to reflect on their own lives, values, and beliefs, promoting self-discovery and personal growth.

Enduring Literary Characters:

Iconic literary characters have a lasting impact on popular culture and the collective imagination. Characters like Sherlock Holmes, Hamlet, or Elizabeth Bennet have become archetypes, influencing the portrayal of similar characters in other works and becoming a part of our cultural lexicon.

Preservation of History and Memory:

Literature plays a crucial role in preserving historical events, experiences, and cultural memories. Historical novels, memoirs, and eyewitness accounts provide valuable insights into past eras, allowing future generations to learn from and connect with the past.

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  • Subject Guides

Literature Review Basics

  • Primary & Secondary Sources
  • Literature Review Introduction
  • Writing Literature Reviews
  • Tutorials & Samples

The Literature

The Literature refers to the collection of scholarly writings on a topic. This includes peer-reviewed articles, books, dissertations and conference papers.

  • When reviewing the literature, be sure to include major works as well as studies that respond to major works. You will want to focus on primary sources, though secondary sources can be valuable as well.

Primary Sources

The term primary source is used broadly to embody all sources that are original. P rimary sources provide first-hand information that is closest to the object of study. Primary sources vary by discipline.

  • In the natural and social sciences, original reports of research found in academic journals detailing the methodology used in the research, in-depth descriptions, and discussions of the findings are considered primary sources of information.
  • Other common examples of primary sources include speeches, letters, diaries, autobiographies, interviews, official reports, court records, artifacts, photographs, and drawings.  

Galvan, J. L. (2013). Writing literature reviews: A guide for students of the social and behavioral sciences . Glendale, CA: Pyrczak.

Secondary Sources

A secondary source is a source that provides non-original or secondhand data or information. 

  • Secondary sources are written about primary sources.
  • Research summaries reported in textbooks, magazines, and newspapers are considered secondary sources. They typically provide global descriptions of results with few details on the methodology. Other examples of secondary sources include biographies and critical studies of an author's work.

Secondary Source. (2005). In W. Paul Vogt (Ed.), Dictionary of Statistics & Methodology. (3 rd ed., p. 291). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.

Weidenborner, S., & Caruso, D. (1997). Writing research papers: A guide to the process . New York: St. Martin's Press.

More Examples of Primary and Secondary Sources

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Articles & Databases

Explore our collection of hundreds of online resources and databases. Use our free online content to help with your research, whether it's finding a single article, tracing a family tree, learning a new language, or anything in between.

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  • Research Guides

Grey Literature

  • What is Grey Literature? Activities
  • Why Use Grey Literature?
  • Types of Grey Literature
  • Sources of Grey Literature
  • Searching for Grey Literature
  • Evaluating Grey Literature Activity
  • How to Incorporate & Cite Grey Literature

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This guide includes content adapted with permission from the University of Illinois Library .

what is the literature source

What is Grey Literature?

Describing grey literature in its entirety is more challenging than outlining what it isn't. Grey literature encompasses various media, resources, documents, and data that diverge from the conventional academic or commercial publishing pathways, often termed "white literature." If a resource lacks publication in a scholarly journal, it likely falls within the realm of grey literature. Unlike white literature, grey Literature doesn't undergo peer review and typically avoids publication in books or scholarly journals. Today, most grey literature is disseminated digitally through PDFs, web pages, blog posts, and multimedia content. Unlike academic publishing, grey literature authors are not required to possess extensive field experience, though recognized experts or organizations often author the most credible pieces. Grey literature spans a broad spectrum—it's not necessarily always factual or nonfactual, nor is it constrained to a purely professional or casual tone.

what is the literature source

  • A local government's report on the city's water quality
  • The front page news story from a national news company***
  • An engineering PhD candidate's dissertation on keyword latency  
  • The state government's crime statistics from the last year
  • A pamphlet from the Forest Service on the history of a national park
  • A report from an international non-governmental organization (NGO) on modern slavery
  • A blog post from a well-known academic on a new theory concerning her field
  • Tweets from protestors involved in the Arab Spring demonstrations 
  • Court transcripts and other legal documents

All these items can be helpful in research, but using, evaluating, and finding good grey literature can be challenging. This guide is designed to help users understand and navigate the complexities of this special literature. 

***Some do not consider news grey literature because it comes from a commercial publishing system. Still, others do because it is not peer-reviewed or necessarily written by experts in the field. This guide includes news media as grey literature because it is not peer-reviewed and can be evaluated using the same methods as grey literature.

What is "Scholarly" and "Peer Reviewed"?

Scholarly sources (also referred to as academic, peer-reviewed, or refereed sources) are written by experts in a particular field and keep others interested in that field up to date on the most recent research, findings, and news.

When a source has been peer-reviewed, it has undergone the review and scrutiny of a review board of colleagues in the author’s field. They evaluate this source as part of the body of research for a particular discipline and make recommendations regarding its publication in a journal, revisions before publication, or, in some cases, reject its publication.

In essence, when a work is scholarly and peer-reviewed, the work of evaluating a resource is done by the publisher, and the resource user does not have to spend too much time evaluating it themselves. This is extremely useful as it ensures the information is factual. However, the process of peer review is far from perfect; it has its own set of biases and issues with diversity; it is a lengthy process, and scholarly and peer-reviewed works are often expensive to access.

When resources are not peer-reviewed, the work of evaluating the resources falls almost entirely on the user. Grey literature is typically only reviewed for accuracy by their organization, and the process varies widely from organization to organization if they have one at all. The users reading the information cannot be sure if anyone has reviewed the facts presented in grey literature and if the organizations' biases have distorted the facts.  

Activity: What is Grey Literature?

Use the interactive module below to test your knowledge of grey literature!

Activity: Grey Literature Drag and Drop

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What are literary sources? Give two examples?

There are three kinds of literary sources namely religious, foreign and secular accounts. Literary sources remind us of our ancestor’s social, political, economic, cultural & religious activities. In nature, most of the ancient manuscripts are religious. In addition to religious literature, also there is a huge volume of secular literature on math, science and medicine. In ancient and medieval times, many educated individuals travelled around the globe.

  • History of Vedic, Pali, Sanskrit Prakrit, and other discoveries at the same time as other external accounts constitutes the literary source.
  • The Puranic literature is considered by Indians as history, except for events and states, it does not have any particular time period.
  • The literary origins of a history book are archaeological discoveries, such as Coins, monuments, manuscripts, and so on.

Check out the video below for more information on Historians And Their Sources

what is the literature source

Articles to Explore:

  • What are the sources for Medieval Indian History?
  • What is the difference between archaeological and literary sources?

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What are the types of literary sources? Give examples.

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  • Harvard Library
  • Research Guides
  • Faculty of Arts & Sciences Libraries

Library Research Guide for the History of Science: Introduction

  • What is a Primary Source?
  • Senior Theses 2023
  • Background and Context/Biography
  • Exploring Your Topic
  • Using HOLLIS
  • What is a Secondary Source?

Page Contents

Knowing a primary source when you see one, kinds of primary sources, find primary sources in hollis, using digital libraries and collections online, using bibliographies.

  • Exploring the Special Collections at Harvard
  • Citing Sources & Organizing Research

Primary sources provide first-hand testimony or direct evidence concerning a topic under investigation. They are created by witnesses or recorders who experienced the events or conditions being documented.

Often these sources are created at the time when the events or conditions are occurring, but primary sources can also include autobiographies, memoirs, and oral histories recorded later.

Primary sources are characterized by their content, regardless of the format available. (Handwritten notes could be published; the published book might be digitized or put on microfilm, but those notes are still primary sources in any format).

Some types of primary sources:

  • Original documents (excerpts or translations acceptable): Diaries, speeches, manuscripts, letters, interviews, news film footage, contemporary newspaper articles, autobiographies, official records, pamphlets, meeting notes, photographs, contemporary sketches
  • Creative works : Poetry, drama, novels, music, art 
  • Relics or artifacts : Furniture, clothing, buildings

Examples of primary sources include:

  • A poster from the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters' 1962 strike
  • The papers of William James
  • A 1970 U.S. State Dept document updating Nixon on U.S.-Soviet space cooperation activities (Harvard login)
  • A British pamphlet: "Electric Lighting for Country Houses," 1898
  • Phineas Gage's skull
  • The text of J. Robert Oppenheimer's "Atomic Weapons" presentation to the American Philosophical Society

Outline of Primary Sources for History

Archives and Manuscripts

Archives and manuscripts are the unpublished records of persons (letters, notes, diaries, etc.) and organizations. What are Archives?   Usually each archival collection has a (short) catalog record and a detailed finding aid (which is often available online).

  • "Catalog record” refers to the kind of record found in library online catalogs, similar to those for books, although often a bit longer. Example of an Archive record .
  • “Finding aid” (sometimes called an inventory) generally refers to a list of the folder labels for the collection, accompanied by a brief collection overview (scope and contents note) and a biographical (or institutional) note on the creator of the collection.  Finding aids may be as long as needed given the size of the collection.  They vary considerably according to the practices of individual repositories. Example of a Finding aid .

To find  Archives and manuscripts  at Harvard, go to  HOLLIS Advanced search .  Search your keywords or Subject terms (see the  HOLLIS page of this guide ) in the Library Catalog, limiting to Resource Type: Archives/Manuscripts.  You can choose the library at the right (Search Scope).  Countway  Medicine has abundant medical archives, and Schlesinger has many archives of women activists, many in health and reproductive rights fields.    Sample search on Subject: Women health .

Library Research Guide for Finding Manuscripts and Archival Collections explains

  • How to find archives and manuscripts at Harvard
  • How to find archives and manuscripts elsewhere in US via search tools and via subject guides .
  • How to find archives and manuscripts in Europe and elsewhere.
  • Requesting digitization of archival material from Harvard and from other repositories .

For digitized archival material together with other kinds of primary sources:

  • Finding Primary Sources Online offers general instructions for finding primary sources online and a list of resources by region and country
  • Online Primary Source Collections for the History of Science lists digital collections at Harvard and beyond by topic.
  • Online Primary Source Collections for History lists digital collections at Harvard and beyond by topic.

Methods for finding books are described under the HOLLIS page  of this guide and in the Finding Primary Sources in HOLLIS box on this page. 

  • Book Reviews may give an indication as to how a scientific work was received. See:   Finding Book Reviews . 
  • Numerous, especially pre-1923 books (as well as periodicals and other sources) can be found and full text searched in several digital libraries (see box on this page).

Periodicals

Scientific articles :

Web of Science Citation Indexes (Harvard Login)  (1900- ) articles in all areas of science. Includes medical articles not in PubMed. You can use the Cited Reference search in the Web of Science to find primary source articles that cite a specified article, thus getting an idea of its reception. More information on the Web of Science .

PubMed (1946- ) covers, usually with abstracts, periodical articles on all areas of medicine. - --Be sure to look at the MeSH (Medical Subject Headings)  at the bottom of pertinent records. Very recent articles may not as yet received their MeSH terms.  So look at older records to find the MeSH terms, and use a variety of keywords as well as MeSH terms to find the new records. --​The MeSH terms are the same as the Medical Subject terms found in HOLLIS. --Hit Free article or Try Harvard Library, not the publisher's name to see full text

JSTOR (Harvard Login)  offers full-text of complete runs (up to about 5 years ago) of over 400 journals. JSTOR allows simultaneous or individual searching, full-text searching optional, numerous journals in a variety of fields of science and medicine. See the list at the bottom of the Advanced search screen. JSTOR searches the "Notes and News" sections of journals ( Science is especially rich in this material). In Advanced Search choose Item Type: Miscellaneous to limit largely to "Notes and News".

PsycINFO) (Harvard Login)  (1872- ) indexes the professional and academic literature in psychology and related disciplines

Many more scientific periodical indexes are listed in the Library Research Guide for the History of Science .

General interest magazines and periodicals see:

American Periodicals Series Online (Harvard Login)  (1740-1900) offers full text of about 1100 American periodicals. Includes several scientific and medical journals including the American Journal of Science and the Medical Repository. In cases where a periodical started before 1900, coverage is included until 1940.

British Periodicals (Harvard Login)  (1681-1920) offers full text for several hundred British periodicals.

Ethnic NewsWatch (Harvard Login)  (1959- ) is a full text database of the newspapers, magazines, and journals of the ethnic, minority and native press.

Periodicals Index Online (Harvard Login)  indexes contents of thousands of US and European journals in the humanities and social sciences, from their first issues to 1995.

Reader's Guide Retrospective (WilsonWeb) (Harvard Login)  (1890-1982)  indexes many American popular periodicals.

Many more general periodical indexes are listed in Finding Articles in General and Popular Periodicals (North America and Western Europe) .

Articles in non-science fields (religion, public policy): see the list in the Library Research Guide for History .

Professional/Trade : Aimed at particular trades or professions.  See the Library Research Guide for History

Newspaper articles : see the Guide to Newspapers and Newspaper Indexes .

Personal accounts . These are first person narratives recalling or describing a person’s life and opinions. These include Diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, and when delivered orally and recorded: Oral histories and Interviews.

National Library of Medicine Oral Histories

Regulatory Oral History Hub  (Kenan Institute for Ethics, Duke University) offers links to digital collections containing interviews with regulators, lawyers, and judges. Mainly U.S.

Visual sources :

Records for many, but by no means all, individual Harvard University Library images are available in  HOLLIS Images , an online catalog of images. Records include subjects and a thumbnail image.  HOLLIS Images is included in HOLLIS  searches.

Science & Society Picture Library offers over 50,000 images from the Science Museum (London), the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television and the National Railway Museum.

Database of Scientific Illustrators  (DSI) includes over 12500 illustrators in natural history, medicine, technology and various sciences worldwide, c.1450-1950. Living illustrators excluded. 

NYPL Digital Gallery Pictures of Science: 700 Years of Scientific and Medical Illustration

Images from the History of Medicine (IHM) includes prints and photographs from the U.S. National Library of Medicine. (The IHM is contained within a larger NLM image database, so this link goes to a specialized search).

Images From the History of the Public Health Service: a Photographic Exhibit .

Wellcome Images

Films/Videos

To find films in  HOLLIS , search your topic keywords, then on the right side of the results screen, look at Resource Type and choose video/film.

To find books about films about your topic, search your topic keywords AND "in motion pictures" ​  (in "")

​Film Platform  offers numerous documentary films on a wide variety of subjects.  There are collections on several topics. Searches can be filtered by topic, country of production, and language. 

A list of general sources for images and film is available in the Library Research Guide for History and additional sources for the history of science in Library Research Guide for the History of Science .

Government documents often concern matters of science and health policy.  For Congressional documents, especially committee reports, see ProQuest Congressional (Harvard Login ). 

HathiTrust Digital Library . Each full text item is linked to a standard library catalog record, thus providing good metadata and subject terms. The catalog can be searched separately.  Many government documents are full text viewable.  Search US government department as Author.

More sources are listed in the Library Research Guide for History

For artifacts and other objects , the Historic Scientific Instruments Collection in the Science Center includes over 15,000 instruments, often with contemporary documentation, from 1450 through the 20th century worldwide.

Waywiser, online database of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments .

Warren Anatomical Museum of the Center for the History of Medicine in the Countway Library of Medicine has a rich collection of medical artifacts and specimens.

Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology

Fall 2020: these collections are closed during the pandemic. Check out their links above to see what they have available online.

Primary Source Terms :

You can limit HOLLIS  searches to your time period, but sources may be published later, such as a person's diary published posthumously. Find these with these special Subject terms.

You can use the following terms to search HOLLIS for primary sources:

  • Correspondence
  • Description and travel
  • Manuscripts
  • Notebooks, sketchbooks, etc.
  • Personal narratives (refers to accounts of wars and diseases only)
  • Pictorial works
  • Sources (usually refers to collections of published primary sources)

Include these terms with your topical words in HOLLIS searches. For example: tuberculosis personal narratives

Online Primary Source Collections for the History of Science lists digital collections at Harvard and beyond by topic

Google Book Search, HathiTrust Digital Library and Internet Archives offer books and periodicals digitized from numerous libraries.  Only out-of-copyright, generally post-1923, books are fully viewable.  Each of these three digital libraries allows searching full text over their entire collections.

Google Book Search

HathiTrust Digital Library . Each full text item is linked to a standard library catalog record, thus providing good metadata and subject terms. The catalog can be searched separately.  Many post-1923 out-of-copyright books, especially government documents, are full text viewable. You can search within copyright books to see what page your search term is on.

Internet Archive now offers a beta full text search. Put your terms (phrases or personal names, in quotation marks (""), work best) in the search box. 

The Online Books Page arranges electronic texts by Library of Congress call numbers and is searchable (but not full text searchable).  Includes books not in Google Books, HathiTrust, or Internet Archive. Has many other useful features.

Medical Heritage Library . Information about the Medical Heritage Library. Now searchable full text.

UK Medical Heritage Library

Biodiversity Heritage Library

Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics (1493-1922) provides digitized historical, manuscript, and image resources selected from Harvard University libraries and archives.

Expeditions and Discoveries (1626-1953) features nine expeditions in anthropology and archaeology, astronomy, botany, and oceanography in which Harvard University played a significant role. Includes manuscripts and records, published materials, visual works, and maps from 14 Harvard repositories.

Defining Gender Online: Five Centuries of Advice Literature for Men and Women (1450-1910).

Twentieth Century Advice Literature: North American Guides on Race, Sex, Gender, and the Family.

Many more general History digital libraries and collections: Library Research Guide for History

More History of Science digital libraries: Library Research Guide for the History of Science .

There may already be a detailed list of sources (a bibliography) for your topic.

For instance:

A bibliography of eugenics , by Samuel J. Holmes ... Berkeley, Calif., University of California press, 1924, 514 p. ( University of California publications in zoology . vol. XXV)  Full text online .

Look for specialized subject bibliographies in HOLLIS Catalog . Example .   WorldCat can do similar searches in the Subject Keyword field for non-Harvard holdings.

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Harvard University Digital Accessibility Policy

ENGL 1140: Writing Medicine, Stories of Illness & Healing (Spring 2024): Home

Activity time.

Step 1:  Think about the content you have been reading and discussing in class. Consider themes related to illness, health and healing you've read about, or subjects that come up in the material you're learning. What are some words or phrases that come to mind?

Step 2: Around the room, you'll find several library books on related themes. Take a few minutes to look through these books. What terms might you use to describe these sources? 

Enter your responses in the Padlet below: 

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Getting Oriented with Background Literature!

Tertiary sources are a useful place to begin your search and familiarize yourself with a research topic. These include encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other compilations or indexes of existing sources.

  • Oxford Bibliographies Online Developed cooperatively with scholars and librarians worldwide, Oxford Bibliographies offers exclusive, authoritative research guides.

Cover Art

  • Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia Routledge, 2006. Print version: Olin Reference HQ 1147 .E85 W66 2006. "[L]ess about medieval women and more about gender issues than the title suggests or readers might initially anticipate.""[Choice, May 2007] "Female patronage of the arts and the church, female mysticism and devotional practices, women's medicine and understandings of the female body, and women's roles in politics and diplomacy are among the activities discussed in the 563 signed articles, each with cross-references to other articles and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources." [Reference & Research Book News, Feb. 2007]
  • Medieval England : An encyclopedia Publication Date: 2017

what is the literature source

Subject Headings!

Below are links to some subject headings from the library catalogue that may lead you to additional relevant literature.

Medicine, Medieval

Human Body>Social Aspects>History

Civilization, Medieval

Women healers, Medieval

Using the Library Catalogue

How do I locate a book or other resource through the library catalogue? 

Library website:  https://www.library.cornell.edu/

what is the literature source

Here is a more detailed guide on using the catalogue and reading call numbers.

Classifications to know: 

B-Psychology, Philosophy, Religion

P-Literatures & Language

D-History, General & Old World

Secondary Sources: Databases & Guides!

What are secondary sources? Secondary sources are documents or recordings of information originally presented elsewhere. Below are some broader humanities and social science databases, and some more discipline-specific sources for medieval studies.

what is the literature source

  • Feminae: Medieval women and gender index An index to journal articles, book reviews, and essays in books about women, sexuality, and gender during the Middle Ages. Books written by a single author are not indexed. The time period covered is 450 C.E. to 1500 C.E. and the geographic area is Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Subject coverage for gender and sexuality means that articles on masculinity and male homosexuality are included.
  • History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Provides citations and some brief abstracts to journal articles, conference proceedings, books, book reviews, and dissertations in the history of science, technology and medicine and allied historical fields from prehistory to the present.
  • International Medieval Bibliography Online (IMB) The International Medieval Bibliography (IMB) is the world's leading interdisciplinary bibliography of the European Middle Ages, covering Europe, the Middle East and North Africa in the period 400-1500. The IMB was founded in 1967 with the support of the Medieval Academy of America. Its editorial staff is based at the International Medieval Institute at the University of Leeds, and the project is supported by over 50 teams of contributors in Europe, North America, Australia and Japan. The database comprises over 300,000 articles derived from regular coverage of some 4500 periodicals and 5000 miscellany volume (conference proceedings, essay collections, Festschriften and exhibition catalogues). All articles are classified with full bibliographical details and subject classifications and indexing familiar to medievalists.
  • Iter : gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance A bibliographic database of interdisciplinary journal literature pertaining to the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 400-1700. Includes articles, reviews, bibliographies, catalogs, editions, abstracts, discographies, and notes.

Citation Matters!

It's important to cite others' work ethically. As literary scholars, writers, and appreciators of literature, who you cite and how you give credit to other creators has the power to amplify their work and literary voice. Below are some useful concepts, tools, and resources to help you practice inclusive and ethical research!

ZoteroBib is a useful tool for generating bibliographies in your preferred citation style. You can enter information manually, or enter a URL to the resource to generate a citation.

what is the literature source

Excelsior Online Writing Lab is an excellent resource to refer to for questions regarding citation style, in-text citations, footnotes and endnotes, or any formatting questions you may have. You can also explore the APA style guide here . 

Cornell Libraries offer citation management resources and workshops.

Remember to consider citation justice as you create a reference list throughout your research. Citation justice is defined as: " The act of citing authors/sources based on identity to uplift marginalized voices with the knowledge that citation is used as a form of power in a patriarchal society based on white supremacy" (Coalter 2022).

In reviewing the references, artwork, and other sources you've compiled in your research, ask yourself:

Whose voices are represented?

Whose voices are missing? 

what is the literature source

Hannah Toombs (she/her/hers)

Engaged Learning Librarian

Co-Liaison to Latin American Studies

[email protected]

Digital Collections & Primary Sources

Digital collections and online guides to understanding primary sources can be a useful tool for accessing material to use in your research, and for getting more context for the resources you find in research!

History of Medicine Digital Exhibits (McMaster University)

"What a Piece of Work is Man": Reading the Body in Medieval Manuscripts (St. Louis University)

Historical Anatomies on the Web

What Else Can I do at the Library?

Can't find the book or resource you're looking for? Get it through Borrow Direct, InterLibrary Loan , or recommend a purchase !

Looking for study space for a group or yourself? Find one here !

Need personalized research support? Meet with a librarian one-on-one , get to know your department's liaison librarian , or c heck out our 24/7 chat !

Need to rent a laptop, audio and video equipment, camera, or other tech? Rent it here !

Looking to learn a new skill like citation management, QGIS, or collections research? Check out our calendar of workshops!

Interested in checking out cool exhibitions, meeting authors, seeing new films, and more? Check out the CUL events calendar !

Do you like to read for fun? We have a guide for that!

Stay in the loop about what's happening at the library by following us on social media!

Cornell University Library Instagram

what is the literature source

Additional Reading

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Land Acknowledgement

Cornell University is located on the traditional homelands of the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ' (the Cayuga Nation). The Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ' are members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, an alliance of six sovereign Nations with a historic and contemporary presence on this land. The Confederacy precedes the establishment of Cornell University, New York state, and the United States of America. We acknowledge the painful history of Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ' dispossession, and honor the ongoing connection of Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ' people, past and present, to these lands and waters.

This land acknowledgment has been reviewed and approved by the traditional Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ' leadership.

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  • Working with sources
  • Primary vs. Secondary Sources | Difference & Examples

Primary vs. Secondary Sources | Difference & Examples

Published on June 20, 2018 by Raimo Streefkerk . Revised on May 31, 2023.

When you do research, you have to gather information and evidence from a variety of sources.

Primary sources provide raw information and first-hand evidence. Examples include interview transcripts, statistical data, and works of art. Primary research gives you direct access to the subject of your research.

Secondary sources provide second-hand information and commentary from other researchers. Examples include journal articles, reviews, and academic books . Thus, secondary research describes, interprets, or synthesizes primary sources.

Primary sources are more credible as evidence, but good research uses both primary and secondary sources.

Table of contents

What is a primary source, what is a secondary source, primary and secondary source examples, how to tell if a source is primary or secondary, primary vs secondary sources: which is better, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about primary and secondary sources.

A primary source is anything that gives you direct evidence about the people, events, or phenomena that you are researching. Primary sources will usually be the main objects of your analysis.

If you are researching the past, you cannot directly access it yourself, so you need primary sources that were produced at the time by participants or witnesses (e.g. letters, photographs, newspapers ).

If you are researching something current, your primary sources can either be qualitative or quantitative data that you collect yourself (e.g. through interviews , surveys , experiments ) or sources produced by people directly involved in the topic (e.g. official documents or media texts).

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The AI-powered Citation Checker helps you avoid common mistakes such as:

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what is the literature source

A secondary source is anything that describes, interprets, evaluates, or analyzes information from primary sources. Common examples include:

  • Books , articles and documentaries that synthesize information on a topic
  • Synopses and descriptions of artistic works
  • Encyclopedias and textbooks that summarize information and ideas
  • Reviews and essays that evaluate or interpret something

When you cite a secondary source, it’s usually not to analyze it directly. Instead, you’ll probably test its arguments against new evidence or use its ideas to help formulate your own.

Examples of sources that can be primary or secondary

A secondary source can become a primary source depending on your research question . If the person, context, or technique that produced the source is the main focus of your research, it becomes a primary source.

Documentaries

If you are researching the causes of World War II, a recent documentary about the war is a secondary source . But if you are researching the filmmaking techniques used in historical documentaries, the documentary is a primary source .

Reviews and essays

If your paper is about the novels of Toni Morrison, a magazine review of one of her novels is a secondary source . But if your paper is about the critical reception of Toni Morrison’s work, the review is a primary source .

Newspaper articles

If your aim is to analyze the government’s economic policy, a newspaper article about a new policy is a secondary source . But if your aim is to analyze media coverage of economic issues, the newspaper article is a primary source .

To determine if something can be used as a primary or secondary source in your research, there are some simple questions you can ask yourself:

  • Does this source come from someone directly involved in the events I’m studying (primary) or from another researcher (secondary)?
  • Am I interested in evaluating the source itself (primary) or only using it for background information (secondary)?
  • Does the source provide original information (primary) or does it comment upon information from other sources (secondary)?

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

Most research uses both primary and secondary sources. They complement each other to help you build a convincing argument. Primary sources are more credible as evidence, but secondary sources show how your work relates to existing research. Tertiary sources are often used in the first, exploratory stage of research.

What do you use primary sources for?

Primary sources are the foundation of original research. They allow you to:

  • Make new discoveries
  • Provide credible evidence for your arguments
  • Give authoritative information about your topic

If you don’t use any primary sources, your research may be considered unoriginal or unreliable.

What do you use secondary sources for?

Secondary sources are good for gaining a full overview of your topic and understanding how other researchers have approached it. They often synthesize a large number of primary sources that would be difficult and time-consuming to gather by yourself. They allow you to:

  • Gain background information on the topic
  • Support or contrast your arguments with other researchers’ ideas
  • Gather information from primary sources that you can’t access directly (e.g. private letters or physical documents located elsewhere)

When you conduct a literature review or meta analysis, you can consult secondary sources to gain a thorough overview of your topic. If you want to mention a paper or study that you find cited in a secondary source, seek out the original source and cite it directly.

Remember that all primary and secondary sources must be cited to avoid plagiarism . You can use Scribbr’s free citation generator to do so!

If you want to know more about ChatGPT, AI tools , citation , and plagiarism , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

  • ChatGPT vs human editor
  • ChatGPT citations
  • Is ChatGPT trustworthy?
  • Using ChatGPT for your studies
  • What is ChatGPT?
  • Chicago style
  • Paraphrasing

 Plagiarism

  • Types of plagiarism
  • Self-plagiarism
  • Avoiding plagiarism
  • Academic integrity
  • Consequences of plagiarism
  • Common knowledge

Common examples of primary sources include interview transcripts , photographs, novels, paintings, films, historical documents, and official statistics.

Anything you directly analyze or use as first-hand evidence can be a primary source, including qualitative or quantitative data that you collected yourself.

Common examples of secondary sources include academic books, journal articles , reviews, essays , and textbooks.

Anything that summarizes, evaluates or interprets primary sources can be a secondary source. If a source gives you an overview of background information or presents another researcher’s ideas on your topic, it is probably a secondary source.

To determine if a source is primary or secondary, ask yourself:

  • Was the source created by someone directly involved in the events you’re studying (primary), or by another researcher (secondary)?
  • Does the source provide original information (primary), or does it summarize information from other sources (secondary)?
  • Are you directly analyzing the source itself (primary), or only using it for background information (secondary)?

Some types of source are nearly always primary: works of art and literature, raw statistical data, official documents and records, and personal communications (e.g. letters, interviews ). If you use one of these in your research, it is probably a primary source.

Primary sources are often considered the most credible in terms of providing evidence for your argument, as they give you direct evidence of what you are researching. However, it’s up to you to ensure the information they provide is reliable and accurate.

Always make sure to properly cite your sources to avoid plagiarism .

A fictional movie is usually a primary source. A documentary can be either primary or secondary depending on the context.

If you are directly analyzing some aspect of the movie itself – for example, the cinematography, narrative techniques, or social context – the movie is a primary source.

If you use the movie for background information or analysis about your topic – for example, to learn about a historical event or a scientific discovery – the movie is a secondary source.

Whether it’s primary or secondary, always properly cite the movie in the citation style you are using. Learn how to create an MLA movie citation or an APA movie citation .

Articles in newspapers and magazines can be primary or secondary depending on the focus of your research.

In historical studies, old articles are used as primary sources that give direct evidence about the time period. In social and communication studies, articles are used as primary sources to analyze language and social relations (for example, by conducting content analysis or discourse analysis ).

If you are not analyzing the article itself, but only using it for background information or facts about your topic, then the article is a secondary source.

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

Streefkerk, R. (2023, May 31). Primary vs. Secondary Sources | Difference & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved February 20, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/working-with-sources/primary-and-secondary-sources/

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‘We’re Going to Stand Up’: Queer Literature is Booming in Africa

Even in countries where homophobia is pervasive and same-sex relationships are illegal, authors are pushing boundaries, finding an audience and winning awards.

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This photo montage includes four images of African writers. Clockwise from top left are Kevin Mwachiro; Monica Arac de Nyeko; Chinelo Okparanta and Arinze Ifeakandu.

By Abdi Latif Dahir

Reporting from Nairobi, Kenya.

As a queer teenager growing up in northern Nigeria, Arinze Ifeakandu often found himself searching for books that reflected what he felt.

He combed through the books at home and imagined closer bonds between the same-sex characters. He scoured the book stands in Kano, the city where he lived, hoping to find stories that focused on L.G.B.T.Q. lives. Later, in furtive visits to internet cafes, he came across gay romance stories, but they often focused on lives far from his own, featuring closeted white jocks living in snowy towns.

Ifeakandu wanted more. He began writing short stories in which gay men battled loneliness but also found lust and love in conservative, modern-day Nigeria.

“I have always taken my own desires, my own fears, my own joys seriously,” Ifeakandu, 29, said. “I knew I wanted to write characters who are queer. That’s the only way I am going to show up on the page.”

His stories gained traction with readers, and with critics. In 2017, he became a finalist for the Caine Prize for African Writing , and last year, his debut collection, “God’s Children Are Little Broken Things,” won the Dylan Thomas Prize for young writers.

Ifeakandu’s work is part of a boom in books by L.G.B.T.Q. writers across Africa. Long obscured in literature and public life, their stories are taking center stage in works that are pushing boundaries across the continent — and winning rave reviews.

Big publishing houses in Europe and the United States are getting in on the action, but so are new publishers cropping up across the continent with the goal of publishing African writers for a primarily African audience.

Thabiso Mahlape, who founded Blackbird Books in South Africa, has published Nakhane , a queer writer and artist , and “ Exhale ,” a queer anthology. “So much more can be done,” she said.

The gathering momentum dovetails with a broader cultural moment. More Africans are openly discussing sex and expressing their sexual and gender identities. Small Pride marches and film festivals are celebrating queer experiences, and some African religious leaders are speaking up in support of L.G.B.T.Q. people .

Young people, who make up the majority of the continent’s population , are turning to social media to discuss these books, and the big screen is bringing some of them to a wider readership: “ Jambula Tree,” a short story by Uganda’s Monica Arac de Nyeko about the romance between two girls, inspired “ Rafiki ,” a film that was featured in Cannes .

The books — fiction, nonfiction and graphic novels — are also being published as a way to push back against virulent homophobia and anti-gay legislation across Africa .

By writing them, authors say they hope to engage readers and challenge pervasive notions that homosexuality is a Western import.

“These books are an invitation to change mindsets and to start a dialogue,” said Kevin Mwachiro, who coedited “We’ve Been Here,” a nonfiction anthology about queer Kenyans who are 50 or older.

“These books are saying, ‘I am not a victim anymore,’” he said. “It’s gay people saying, ‘We don’t want to be tolerated. We want respect.’”

The momentum is new, but books centering queer stories are not without precedent in Africa.

Mohamed Choukri’s 1972 novel “For Bread Alone” caused a furor in Morocco for its depiction of same-sex intimacy and drug consumption. The mesmerizing 2010 novel “In A Strange Room,” by the South African Booker Prize winner Damon Galgut, followed an itinerant gay protagonist. And the Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina made global headlines in 2014 when he published a “lost chapter” of his memoir titled “I am a homosexual, mum.”

But the books being published now, literary experts and publishers say, are expanding Africa’s literary canon. These stories — family sagas, thrillers, sci-fi and more — dive into the complexities of being queer in Africa and in the diaspora.

Their writers interrogate the silence surrounding queer culture in their own communities ( “Love Offers No Safety,” edited by Jude Dibia and Olumide F Makanjuola) and the hope and heartache of being trans or gender fluid (Akwaeke Emezi’s “The Death of Vivek Oji” ), intersex (Buki Papillon’s “An Ordinary Wonder” ) or lesbian (Trifonia Melibea Obono’s “La Bastarda.” )

They look into the intersection of politics, religion and sex (“You Have to Be Gay to Know God” by Siya Khumalo) and the vicissitudes of the secretive gay scene in a bustling metropolis (“No One Dies Yet” by Kobby Ben Ben.)

The books also explore the awkward and difficult process of coming out to conservative parents ( Uzodinma Iweala’s “Speak No Evil” ) and imagine entire families whose members are on the L.G.B.T.Q. continuum (“The Butterfly Jungle” by Diriye Osman ). “More Than Words,” a 2023 illustrated book from the Kenyan creative collective The Nest, looks at the everyday life of gay Africans through sci-fi and fan fiction.

The authors often use works of fiction to imagine bold new worlds.

The Nigerian American writer Chinelo Okparanta focuses on the coming-of-age story of a young woman during Nigeria’s Biafra Civil War in her 2015 novel “Under the Udala Trees.” The book’s protagonist, Ijeoma, meets Ndidi after finishing school. Together, they attend secret lesbian parties in a church, explore sexual pleasure and even talk about getting married.

Growing up, Okparanta said she read “So Long A Letter,” a 1979 epistolary novel by the Senegalese writer Mariama Bâ in which a widow writes to her longtime friend, and found herself imagining “a world where there might be more to the women’s relationship,” she said. “I must have been hungry for an African novel with a story like that.”

“Under the Udala Trees” ends on a hopeful note: Ijeoma’s mother accepts her and she and Ndidi end up together after her marriage to a man falls apart. Ndidi even imagines a Nigeria safe for gay people — a powerful statement, given that the book was published a year after Nigeria’s former leader signed a punitive anti-gay law .

“There needs to be room for people to have hope,” Okparanta said.

Nonfiction authors, too, are sharing their experiences of love and dating, of navigating hostile workplaces and of facing rejection from their own kin and finding what they call their “chosen” families. Even when they prioritize confession and catharsis, some of the books also aim to give a window into the lives of gay people on the continent.

“Sometimes people think we are just freaks having sex with each other and that there’s no love, there’s no desire, there’s no sensuality,” said Chiké Frankie Edozien, whose memoir “Lives of Great Men: Living and Loving as an African Gay Man” won a Lambda Award.

“I wanted truth and honesty and vulnerability,” he said.

Like Edozien, who lives in the Ghanaian capital, Accra, with frequent stays in New York, some queer African writers have relocated or established their careers in the West, and use their work to explore not only the communities they left behind but also those they live in.

These include Abdellah Taïa, the Paris-based writer originally from Morocco who is often considered the first openly gay Arab writer and filmmaker . Taïa has written nine novels that probe what it means to be Muslim, queer, Arab and African. He has also made two films: “Salvation Army,” which is adapted from his eponymous novel, and “Never Stop Shouting,” which addresses his gay nephew .

But Taïa’s work has also focused on France and Europe and the anti-migrant and anti-Muslim sentiments that have sprung there.

“If you are gay, and only thinking about gay liberation and only about that, it means you understand nothing about how the world is functioning,” Taïa said. “I am not totally free because other people are not free.”

For many of these authors, publishing has brought public recognition and even appreciation. But some have faced harassment or even death threats .

Edozien hopes the books will inspire younger generations to read a “dignified and balanced” portrayal of gay Africans.

“Books are really powerful, books are really intimate,” Edozien said. And having these queer-centered stories in “libraries for decades to come is great, because the needle has been moved even when it doesn’t feel like it.”

Ifeakandu dreams of a future where queer-centered African stories are no longer the exception to the rule.

“I didn’t choose the country I was born into, just as much as I didn’t choose my sexuality,” Ifeakandu said. “Grudgingly, hopefully, we’re going to stand up.”

Abdi Latif Dahir is the East Africa correspondent for The Times, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He covers a broad range of issues including geopolitics, business, society and arts. More about Abdi Latif Dahir

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Even in countries where homophobia is pervasive and same-sex relationships are illegal, queer African writers are pushing boundaries , finding an audience and winning awards.

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For people of all ages in Pasadena, Calif., Vroman’s Bookstore, founded in 1894, has been a mainstay in a world of rapid change. Now, its longtime owner says he’s ready to turn over the reins .

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The Bartender and the Lost Literary Masterpiece

By Simon Parkin

Jack Chadwick in front of shelves of books.

In 2021, Jack Chadwick, a twenty-seven-year-old barman and part-time go-go dancer, was browsing the shelves of the Working Class Movement Library, outside Manchester, when he spied an arresting book cover. The hand-drawn illustration showed a skeleton kneeling in supplication, its arms outstretched. Chadwick knew of neither the book, “ Caliban Shrieks ,” nor its writer, Jack Hilton. But he became absorbed in the text. At closing time, after several hours of concentrated reading, he closed the book and asked the librarian what she could tell him about the author. Very little, she said—only that, after a brief literary career, Hilton had disappeared.

A Google search provided Chadwick with fragments of backstory. Hilton was born at the turn of the twentieth century in Oldham, just outside Manchester, into fatal poverty. Seven of his siblings died before the age of two; only three others survived to adulthood. At twelve, he began working in a local cotton mill. Then, having lied about his age, he enlisted and fought in the ravening trenches of northern France. Hilton survived the war, returned to England, and, after a period of homelessness, joined a workers’-rights movement in Rochdale. His rallying speeches soon landed him in prison. When a court order banned him from further agitating, he took to writing.

Hilton, who was then working as a plasterer, had neither literary training nor ambition. “I couldn’t spell three-syllable words,” he later claimed. “Sentences didn’t make sense. Order I did not know.” But his tutor at the Workers’ Educational Association perceived a fierce talent, and sent a sample of his work to a publisher. The editor asked for more. The manuscript that followed was a kind of proto-autofiction. It described a childhood spent working in a factory, the miseries of war and prison, and the rigors of vagrancy, blending memoir, poetry, and polemic into a loose narrative. Hilton’s own assessment was balder: “a vomit of the contents of the guts by a man who had been trod on by society.”

Read our reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction, updated every Wednesday.

what is the literature source

Published in March, 1935, “Caliban Shrieks” soon found acclaim. George Orwell described it as “witty and unusual.” The poet W. H. Auden, a notoriously curmudgeonly critic, praised Hilton’s “magnificent ‘Moby-Dick’ rhetoric.” A singular book in both tone and structure, it was also a work from a marginalized author at a period when English literature was dominated by the beneficiaries of class privilege. “Books like this, which come from genuine workers and present a genuinely working-class outlook, are exceedingly rare and correspondingly important,” Orwell, who was an Old Etonian, wrote. “Caliban Shrieks,” he continued, gave voice to “a normally silent multitude.”

Hilton’s prose carries the twin forces of indignation and adverse experience. Only the well-fed writer, he writes in the novel, has the capacity to summon “nice abstract words” about nature. “You know how,” he imitates, mockingly: “ ‘Sky of silken blue, stuccoed with the golden riplets of sunny tints, above hills of green brown majesty’ . . . Oh, the muck of the metaphor!”

Indulged writers, in Hilton’s view, produce flimsy prose. There is no substitute for the instructive abrasions of experience:

Try it, you stiff collared puritans. Get some idea of what men are, outside your little mousetrap circle. Be a human among god’s chosen, get contaminated, try your skilled springy rapiers against their bludgeons; then you will see it is only the benevolence of a caste that permits you to remain like a marionette with trimmed nails and lemon-coloured gloves.

Still, the fickle tide of literary success carried Hilton toward the “mousetrap circle.” He won a scholarship to Oxford. His book, however, received only a single print run, and its publisher, Cobden-Sanderson, did not survive the Second World War. “Caliban Shrieks” was lost amid the mounting catalogue of titles passed between publishers in a sequence of acquisitions. Hilton had always felt like a “slummy” outsider to the cloistered “lit world.” Soon, he was once again enveloped by obscurity.

Eight decades later, when Chadwick, who hails from a working-class family, read “Caliban Shrieks,” its spiky prose felt both resonant and relevant. He decided to investigate the prospect of republication. A writer friend introduced him to John Merrick, an editor for Verso books who was also interested in Hilton. Merrick advised Chadwick to transcribe the text, so Chadwick returned to the library with a laptop. It was slow work and, with an hour-long bus journey back home, inconvenient. “I was supervising a techno club at the time, staying awake pretty much all weekend, sometimes working the doors then performing my go-go act onstage the same night,” he recalled. “Then, during the week I was doing graphic design for a trade union. ​​I was just really knackered.” Chadwick persuaded the librarian to scan the book for him. After a positive test for COVID -19 kept him home from work, he finished the transcription within a fortnight.

A copy of Caliban Shrieks by Jack Hilton.

Next, Chadwick needed to locate the book’s rights holder. Hilton, he knew, had been married twice, but had died childless in 1983. It wasn’t clear to whom, if anyone, Hilton had left his literary estate. Chadwick signed up for a genealogy service and began to search for a will. He was not the only person to have investigated Hilton’s life and legacy. In 2013, while conducting research for a Ph.D. on working-class writing in the twentieth century, a man named Jack Windle visited a woman in Pewsey, Wiltshire, who claimed that she had delivered meals to Hilton when he lived in the village. “Her cottage was full of stuffed animals and her artwork,” Windle recalled. “And she told me that she had found Jack dead.” But the story would turn out to be unreliable (the woman was later diagnosed with dementia).

Chadwick continued his search, eventually widening his criteria. “Because I’ve been a Jack myself, I know that Jack is often a shorthand version of another name,” he told me. Finally, a search for “George” yielded a death certificate for a man with the same birth year as Hilton. It also listed an address not in Wiltshire but in Oldham, Hilton’s home town.

On a gray Sunday morning, Chadwick took the train to Oldham and began a pub crawl. In each bar near Hilton’s home, he hung posters with his phone number and the headline “Do you remember Jack Hilton?” The posters featured the only photograph Chadwick could find of Hilton, an image published in a Middlesex University journal, from 1985, to mark the writer’s death.

In the Sportsman’s Arms, the pub closest to Hilton’s home, Chadwick was explaining his quest to the landlord when an elderly lady approached from behind. “I think she had been eavesdropping,” Chadwick said. The woman said that she remembered Hilton, and that he often drank at the pub with a friend. “She looked around as if she was searching for them,” Chadwick said. “Then, from memory, she recalled the friend’s name: Brian Hassall.”

Chadwick is rangy and soft-spoken, a gently anarchic young man. (He told me that he was “handy with a lock.”) Before graduating from Cambridge with a master’s in Economic and Political Sociology, he worked on the thirty-third floor of the British Chambers of Commerce in Chengdu, China, at a desk beneath long portraits of Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher. This trajectory might have carried him, like many élite graduates before him, into a life of international diplomacy. But Chadwick was eager to travel on his own terms, and returned to Manchester, where he began working in bars and clubs. His go-go name is Miss Chadwick (so named by friends, who rejected his first alter ego, “Ann Wat”).

On a wet October day, we met at the Sportsman’s Arms. The space was roomy and almost empty, a thick carpet absorbing some of the music from a jukebox. As he rolled a cigarette, Chadwick told me that he had found Hassall’s address in the Whitepages, then knocked on his door, posting a note through the letterbox when no one answered. After a month of waiting, he had “given up on the thought of hearing anything.” Then, in the late summer, he received a reply from Hassall’s wife, Mary. She explained that her husband had recently died, and that she had been in the process of moving when Chadwick’s letter arrived. Mary agreed to meet and, over custard pies, Chadwick explained his mission.

“He was very interested, very genuine, a sincere gentleman,” Mary told me. She remembered Hilton both well and fondly. “My husband was very close to Jack, and Jack used to treat him like a son,” she said. Hilton had spent much of his time at the Hassalls’ home, meeting with Hassall twice a week to go drinking, either at the Sportsman’s Arms or another pub named Help the Poor Struggler. That bar was owned by Albert Pierrepoint, one of Britain’s last hangmen, who served pints there when he wasn’t executing convicts in the prison where Hilton had once been held.

Mary said that Hilton had left much of his estate to her husband, including his parakeet. (She replaced the bird’s cage, which was sooty from Hilton’s cigarette habit, but after a month it died. “I don’t think it went with the cage I bought,” she said.) She did not, however, know anything about the book. “I thought he wrote for magazines,” she told me. It turned out that, as Hassall’s widow, she now owned the rights. Several weeks later, after visiting the library to see the book herself, she signed them over to Chadwick, on the condition he do everything he could to have “Caliban Shrieks” republished.

Not long after, Chadwick wrote a piece for a local newspaper about his discoveries. The story earned him an invitation to speak on BBC Radio 4, a slot usually reserved for famous authors with imminent books. Nick Skidmore, the publishing director of Vintage Classics, the prestigious imprint whose roster has included Alice Munro, Philip Roth, Ian McEwan, and Toni Morrison, was at home in Bristol when he heard the broadcast on his kitchen radio.

Skidmore had taken six months’ paternity leave to look after his son. “I had said to myself that I’m not going to engage with the world of publishing in any kind of way,” he told me. But he found Chadwick’s energy and enthusiasm irresistible. He waited for the inevitable revelation that Hilton’s lost classic was due to be republished. None came.

That day, Skidmore sent Chadwick a direct message on Twitter. The pair talked over the phone and, after Skidmore returned to work, he pitched the book to his colleagues. “It’s totally alive and incredibly honest—an untamed voice,” he told me. He was especially entranced by the book’s subversion of the “romantic” and “Wordsworthian” portrayal of England. “I fell in love when I reached the section on vagrancy,” he said. “There’s this sense that England has gone awry and its industrial complex is taking something away from our humanity. I thought that was incredibly beautiful, and unique.” A deal swiftly followed, for which Chadwick received a modest advance as remuneration for his work. After almost ninety years, “Caliban Shrieks” will be republished in early March.

It is a meaningful rediscovery. Hilton’s disappearance, Skidmore told me, has caused “a massive void in our understanding of British literature.” He believes that “Caliban Shrieks” was a clear influence on much of the political travel-writing that followed. (When Orwell was later commissioned to write “ The Road to Wigan Pier ,” a travelogue of the industrial north, he asked Hilton whether he might visit him in Rochdale.) Vintage is open to publishing other works by Hilton; for Skidmore, their loss reveals the social forces that have shaped the canon. “It throws a spotlight on the way in which we only are familiar with a certain type of canon, and beyond that there’s a whole world—many worlds, in fact—of alternative canons.”

Chadwick, for his part, is currently living in Colombia, and hopes to return to England for the book’s launch party. “I’ve been speaking to former paramilitary in Medellín,” he told me recently. “One of them has written a book. It’s unpublished. But it’s fucking fantastic.” ♦

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IMAGES

  1. 1: Types of literature sources

    what is the literature source

  2. Types of Sources

    what is the literature source

  3. 1: Types of literature sources

    what is the literature source

  4. PPT

    what is the literature source

  5. 1. Sources of Literature.

    what is the literature source

  6. Sources of Literature

    what is the literature source

COMMENTS

  1. How to Write a Literature Review

    A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research that you can later apply to your paper, thesis, or dissertation topic. There are five key steps to writing a literature review:

  2. Literature

    Some deal with abstract ideas or philosophical conceptions. Much purely abstract writing is considered literature only in the widest sense of the term, and the philosophical works that are ranked as great literature are usually presented with more or less of a sensuous garment.

  3. Primary and secondary sources

    Watch on Finding primary sources VU Special Collections - The Special Collections at Victoria University Library are a valuable research resource. The Collections have strong threads of radical literature, particularly Australian Communist literature, much of which is rare or unique. Women and urban planning also feature across the Collections.

  4. Evaluating Literature Reviews and Sources

    First part focus on Introductions and in page 10 in the PDF, 37 in the text, it focus on "literature reviews". Tips for Evaluating Sources (Print vs. Internet Sources) Excellent page that will guide you on what to ask to determine if your source is a reliable one. Check the other topics in the guide: Evaluating Bibliographic Citations and ...

  5. Literature

    Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose, fiction, ... This represents a major source of Christianity's Bible, which has had a major influence on Western literature.

  6. Literature

    literature, a body of written works.The name has traditionally been applied to those imaginative works of poetry and prose distinguished by the intentions of their authors and the perceived aesthetic excellence of their execution. Literature may be classified according to a variety of systems, including language, national origin, historical period, genre, and subject matter.

  7. Literature review sources

    Literature review sources can be divided into three categories as illustrated in table below:...Apart from peer reviewed journals, the following constitute

  8. 1.1: What is Literature?

    Literature is art, but with words. While the artist uses different colors, paintbrushes, mediums, canvases, and techniques, the writer uses different genres and literary techniques called literary devices. Just like different types of paint, paintbrushes, and artistic tools, there are literally hundreds of literary devices, but some of the most ...

  9. Types of Sources

    While peer reviewed articles in scholarly journals are the most common and well-known source of primarily literature in STEM, it can be found in a variety of formats. If your professor asks you to find a primary source for class, this is probably what they're looking for.

  10. 1.1 Characteristics of Scholarly, Grey, and Popular Literature

    These sources are also known as academic sources, peer-reviewed sources, or refereed sources. They are usually research articles published in scholarly journals (in print or electronically). What is Grey Literature? This type of information source is not created through traditional commercial publishing channels.

  11. Types of Sources Explained

    Types of Sources Explained | Examples & Tips Published on May 19, 2022 by Eoghan Ryan . Revised on May 31, 2023. Throughout the research process, you'll likely use various types of sources. The source types commonly used in academic writing include: Academic journals Books Websites Newspapers Encyclopedias

  12. Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Sources

    Sources of information or evidence are often categorized as primary, secondary, or tertiary material. These classifications are based on the originality of the material and the proximity of the source or origin. This informs the reader as to whether the author is reporting information that is first hand or is conveying the experiences and ...

  13. What are the Literary Sources: Types, Importance and Examples

    What are Literary Sources? Sources that help historians reconstruct the past and understand socioeconomic evolution have been broadly divided into two categories: archaeological sources and literary sources. Literary sources are those that are written.

  14. Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Sources

    A primary source is a document or work where its author had a direct interaction or was involved with what was studied or created. These sources are recommended when you need to get information or findings that are a direct result or finding from a study, research, or creation.

  15. How to Find Sources

    Research databases. You can search for scholarly sources online using databases and search engines like Google Scholar. These provide a range of search functions that can help you to find the most relevant sources. If you are searching for a specific article or book, include the title or the author's name. Alternatively, if you're just ...

  16. Source literature

    Source literature (understood as printed texts) is a kind of information source. It might, for example, be cited and used as sources in academic writings, and then called the literature on the subject . The meaning of "source literature" is relative. From the point of view of a bibliographic index the indexed papers are "source literature".

  17. What is Literature

    Literature is a valuable source of knowledge, as it presents ideas, concepts, and information in an engaging and accessible manner. It introduces readers to different subjects, such as history, science, philosophy, psychology, and more, allowing them to expand their understanding and broaden their intellectual horizons.

  18. JSTOR Home

    Harness the power of visual materials—explore more than 3 million images now on JSTOR. Enhance your scholarly research with underground newspapers, magazines, and journals. Explore collections in the arts, sciences, and literature from the world's leading museums, archives, and scholars. JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals ...

  19. Primary & Secondary Sources

    The Literature refers to the collection of scholarly writings on a topic. This includes peer-reviewed articles, books, dissertations and conference papers. When reviewing the literature, be sure to include major works as well as studies that respond to major works.

  20. Literature Resource Center

    Notes: The Literature Resource Center is a literature reference database. It features information on literary figures from all time periods in such genres as fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, history, journalism, and more. Literature Resource Center contains Contemporary Authors Online; Contemporary Literary Criticism Select; and Dictionary ...

  21. Research Guides: Grey Literature: What is Grey Literature?

    Court transcripts and other legal documents. All these items can be helpful in research, but using, evaluating, and finding good grey literature can be challenging. This guide is designed to help users understand and navigate the complexities of this special literature. ***Some do not consider news grey literature because it comes from a ...

  22. What are literary sources? Give two examples?

    Literary sources remind us of our ancestor's social, political, economic, cultural & religious activities. In nature, most of the ancient manuscripts are religious. In addition to religious literature, also there is a huge volume of secular literature on math, science and medicine. In ancient and medieval times, many educated individuals ...

  23. What is a Primary Source?

    Primary Source Terms:. You can limit HOLLIS searches to your time period, but sources may be published later, such as a person's diary published posthumously. Find these with these special Subject terms. You can use the following terms to search HOLLIS for primary sources:. Archives; Correspondence

  24. Home

    As literary scholars, writers, and appreciators of literature, who you cite and how you give credit to other creators has the power to amplify their work and literary voice. ... "The act of citing authors/sources based on identity to uplift marginalized voices with the knowledge that citation is used as a form of power in a patriarchal society ...

  25. Primary vs. Secondary Sources

    A primary source is anything that gives you direct evidence about the people, events, or phenomena that you are researching. Primary sources will usually be the main objects of your analysis.

  26. 'We're Going to Stand Up': Queer Literature is Booming in Africa

    Feb. 17, 2024, 5:01 a.m. ET. As a queer teenager growing up in northern Nigeria, Arinze Ifeakandu often found himself searching for books that reflected what he felt. He combed through the books ...

  27. The Bartender and the Lost Literary Masterpiece

    Still, the fickle tide of literary success carried Hilton toward the "mousetrap circle." He won a scholarship to Oxford. His book, however, received only a single print run, and its publisher ...

  28. What makes a literary city?

    But when it comes to what makes a place good for writers in practical terms, the list of what might turn a city into a properly literary one is more prosaic and urgent. Affordable rents, cafés ...