Search Tips - Identifying different types of information

To begin with, when doing research you may want to start with discovering the key resources in your topic and there is a large number of information sources to search from out there. I have broken them down into three main types. The Primary and secondary resources have increased level of detail and you can be led to these sources from the tertiary sources.

Primary sources consist of original information, written or produced by people directly involved in the research or events being presented or described. Examples include company reports, newspapers, letters, government documents, photographs and speeches. This type of material is important so that you can formulate your own opinions of events by examining first-hand material.

Secondary sources are a good place to start your research into a new topic and provide a useful source of suggestions for further reading on the topic. Examples include textbooks, journal articles, dictionaries, glossaries and reviews. This type of material is important so that you are aware of critical research that has been carried out on a topic already.

Tertiary sources allow you to do broad searches from which you can narrow down and pinpoint the key primary sources. For example you can use an Abstract index database to find articles written about a topic to give you an idea of key authors and then access the articles or books themselves.

So when starting a piece of work, its worth considering the type of information you want, i.e do you need statistical information from company reports, are you interested in the topical angle so you may want to look for newspaper articles etc. If you are not sure where to start you may want to first check the library catalogue to see what books are on that topic, or even your reading list.