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Finding sources

One key to producing a good research paper is good sources Here are some tips on how to find those sources.

Primary and secondary sources

A primary source includes any evidence, textual or material, that was produced by the people or culture being studied--for example, by the ancient Greeks and Romans.   Publications of primary sources inevitably include some interpretive elements. Photographs of ancient artifacts and translations of ancient texts are examples of publications of primary sources, even though decisions about how to translate a text or photograph an object obviously involve a certain amount of modern interpretation.  

A secondary source by contrast presents an individual's or organization's interpretation (scholarly or not). When you read a secondary source, you have to assess whether it is reliable or credible. Do not assume that a source is trustworthy because it is written by an author you recognize, or published by a prestigious press. The author or press might suggest that the work is likely to be reliable, but before you use any specific secondary source in a paper, you still need to evaluate it.

One characteristic of good scholarship is that it makes clear what primary sources it depends on. You should be able to follow the references in a good piece of scholarship until you get back to primary sources. If you are unsure of what evidence your source depends on, be sceptical.

When you write a paper, you are creating a secondary source. Make sure that you clearly cite the primary sources that your argument is based on.

Finding and acquiring sources in Dinand library and beyond

Bibliographic indexes. The library subject catalog may be less helpful than you expect: many primary publications of archaeological material appear as articles in archaeological journals, and will therefore not show up in the subject index of books in Dinand. If you find a useful book, or your instructor recommends a book or article to you, pursue its references: they should lead you back to both earlier publications and to primary material.

More often, you will find it necessary to use a a specialized archaeological bibliography. One especially useful one is DYABOLA, an extensive bibliographic database of the German Archaeological Institute in Rome, with every publication indexed by site and region. Here are notes on how to use DYABOLA to find archaeological bibliography.

Abbreviations. Bibliographic references are often written with cryptic abbreviations. If you find a reference, but can't figure out what an abbreviation stands for, try this search engine. It includes all the abbreviations used by the American Journal of Archaeology (as well as many others).

Interlibrary Loan. While the Holy Cross libraries are a good starter collection, you may discover that they do not possess everything--or even very much--on your, particular research topic.  Never fear!  If you start on your paper early enough, you can obtain most of the books and articles that you need through the Interlibrary Loan Office, located on the second floor of Dinand.  ILL can request books and articles for you from a number of college libraries around the country.  There are three steps to obtaining materials through ILL:

  1. Acquire the pertinent facts of publication for the book or article you would like to obtain.  For a book, this means author, title, publisher, place of publication and date of publication.  For an article, this means author, title of article, title of journal, volume number, date and page numbers.  Do not abbreviate journal titles when you fill out the request form for the ILL office.
  2. Make sure that your book or journal is, in fact, not available in one of the libraries at Holy Cross.  Look it up in the online catalogue.  The ILL office does not look kindly on students who try to order materials that are already here, sitting on the shelf.
  3. Order the material that you would like, using the online forms provided by Interlibrary Loan.  (You can also walk into the ILL office and fill out a paper form, but why would you want to?)  There are separate forms for books and for articles.  Give the office 2-3 weeks to fill your order, or to notify you that it is unable to fill your order.  Articles will usually arrive in your PO Box.  When a book arrives, you will be notified, and will have to pick it up yourself at the ILL office in Dinand.
    Note: students are restricted to ordering 10 ILL items per week.

Finding sources on the World Wide Web

You can use general search engines like Google to search for sources, but it's especially important to be alert to differences between primary and secondary material when using the World Wide Web. Anybody with access to the internet can publish a website on a free service. Has the site you are reading been through the kind of professional review that books and articles normally go through? Does the site include further references (on the WWW or in print bibliography) that you can follow up? If you cannot tell whether a website is providing accurate information, err on the conservative side and do not use it.

Although the WWW is often thought of as immediate and up to date, you should also be especially alert to how current the information on your web site may be. Sadly, publishers sometimes impose copyright restrictions that keep recent scholarly arguments, ideas and discoveries from being published online.  Even a good website may be compelled by copyright law to serve up reference works that are no longer under copyright and that are, therefore, in some respects, out of date. No website is permitted to provide access to the Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae, which is the latest comprehensive reference resource on the monuments and topography of the ancient city of Rome, and includes the results of some very recent research and excavation.  If you want to get your hands on such up-to-date information, you just have to go to the library and pull a volume of the Lexicon Topographicum off the shelf. (Some scholars, including a number of Nobel prize winners, are resisting this tendency: see the call for a boycott of scientific publications that are not freely available at the Public Library of Science web site.)

Here are some examples of secondary sources that might prove helpful to a student working on a particular research project:

As always, when you use somebody else's ideas or information, you must document your sources.  The goal of source documentation is the same for a website as for a book or article, that is, to allow your reader(s) to retrace your steps and examine your source directly.  Therefore, the information that you provide about a website should allow your reader to examine that website.  Here are two different sets of recommendations about how to cite websites:

The WWW has also opened access to a wide range of primary material, which you can use as confidently as you would any printed source. Here are some examples of websites that serve primary material in a manner that is either handy or irreplaceable: