10.1 Primary Research

Depending on the context of the problem they are writing about, many researchers will conduct their own research, what is known as primary data or primary research. Primary research comes in the forms of conducting interviews, taking observation notes, running surveys, focus groups, and experiments where data is collected and analyzed. Researchers often mix both primary and secondary research, depending on the kind of the problem they are investigating. If you are researching a more local context like a group or organization trying to solve a particular problem, you might conduct your own interviews and surveys of the participants to understand the perspective of the group better. Your instructor can help you figure out what kind of primary research may be suitable for the problem you are looking at, as well as some of the ethical concerns you’ll need to keep in mind when doing primary research.

10.1.2 Common Ways to Conduct Primary Research

• Archives and historical documentation
• Surveys
• Interviews
• Focus groups
• Observation notes
• Experiments

10.2 Ethics of Primary and Secondary Researching

Equally important when discerning the quality of your sources and managing your research is to consider ethical questions that may arise in doing both primary and secondary research. In primary research and data collection, researchers must be completely transparent about their intentions to those who might participate in a study, and should obtain written consent from all participants when necessary. Universities that support research have an Institutional Review Board (IRB) that reviews all research projects to ensure they are safe and will not unintentionally hurt people, animals, or the environment. Your instructor can help you think through these ethical questions if you decide to undertake primary research that includes human participants.

In secondary research, ethical questions are ones a researcher must ask themselves, both in how they choose their sources and in the way they quote and reference the sources they draw on. This raises the important question of plagiarism and working with sources in ways that inform your research without overly relying on any one source or using the source’s words as if they were your own. Remember, when you’re researching and writing about a problem, your final goal is to add something new to the larger conversation already going on. Your contribution doesn’t have to be groundbreaking, but it should offer productive discussion and emerge from your critical and ethical synthesis of the sources you have selected.

10.3 Assessing Information and Evaluating Sources

In your secondary research, it’s important to bring a critical lens to your sources. Being critical, in this sense, doesn’t mean “negative”—it means studied discernment of the sources. Studied discernment means that you know a source well enough to understand whether or not it’s credible and how it fits into the larger discourse about the problem. To gain this depth of understanding requires active reading practices and intentional assessment (including fact-checking) of the source.

In today’s world of information abundance, such discernment is needed more than ever. With the rise of twitter bots, filter bubbles, personalized search, and the polarizing effects of social media, the spread of disinformation and misinformation has become its own wicked problem. Both disinformation and misinformation are having profound effects on our political, social, and economic lives, and they only increase the need for researchers to be critically minded and sharper discerners of the quality and veracity of the information they encounter. Thus, the very first thing you’ll want to know before you begin your research is whether or not the problem you are concerned about is really a problem at all and not another misleading headline, conspiracy theory, or junk science.

The following table is a brief list of questions you can refer to as you assess your secondary sources for their credibility, their stance and bias, and how they fit into the larger discourse of the problem you are exploring:

10.4 Tiers of credibility

Sometimes students frame sources as either creditable or not creditable, with only the creditable sources being acceptable for including in a paper. Sometimes “creditable” gets conflated with “scholarly,” even though there are many trustworthy sources from outside of academia. In the below table, we encourage you to consider how even biased sources can be useful, depending on their place in your argument.

10.4.1 Tier 1: Peer-reviewed academic publications

These are sources from the mainstream academic literature: books and scholarly articles. Academic books generally fall into three categories: (1) textbooks written with students in mind, (2) monographs which give an extended report on a large research project, and (3) edited volumes in which each chapter is authored by different people. Scholarly articles appear in academic journals, which are published multiple times a year in order to share the latest research findings with scholars in the field. They’re usually sponsored by some academic society. To get published, these articles and books had to earn favorable anonymous evaluations by qualified scholars. Who are the experts writing, reviewing, and editing these scholarly publications? Your professors. I describe this process below. Learning how to read and use these sources is a fundamental part of being a college student.

10.4.2 Tier 2: Reports, articles and books from credible non-academic sources

Some events and trends are too recent to appear in Tier 1 sources. Also, Tier 1 sources tend to be highly specific, and sometimes you need a more general perspective on a topic. Thus, Tier 2 sources can provide quality information that is more accessible to non-academics. There are three main categories. First, official reports from government agencies or major international institutions like the World Bank or the United Nations; these institutions generally have research departments staffed with qualified experts who seek to provide rigorous, even-handed information to decision-makers. Second, feature articles from major newspapers and magazines like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, London Times, or The Economist are based on original reporting by experienced journalists (not press releases) and are typically 1500+ words in length. Third, there are some great books from non-academic presses that cite their sources; they’re often written by journalists. All three of these sources are generally well researched descriptions of an event or state of the world, undertaken by credentialed experts who generally seek to be even-handed. It is still up to you to judge their credibility. Your instructors and campus librarians can advise you on which sources in this category have the most credibility.

10.4.3 Tier 3. Short pieces from periodicals or credible websites

A step below the well-developed reports and feature articles that make up Tier 2 are the short tidbits that one finds in newspapers and magazines or credible websites. How short is a short news article? Usually, they’re just a couple paragraphs or less, and they’re often reporting on just one thing: an event, an interesting research finding, or a policy change. They don’t take extensive research and analysis to write, and many just summarize a press release written and distributed by an organization or business. They may describe things like corporate mergers, newly discovered diet-health links, or important school-funding legislation. You may want to cite Tier 3 sources in your paper if they provide an important factoid or two that isn’t provided by a higher-tier piece, but if the Tier 3 article describes a particular study or academic expert, your best bet is to find the journal article or book it is reporting on and use that Tier 1 source instead. If the article mentions which journal the study was published in, you can go right to that journal through your library website. Sometimes you can find the original journal article by putting the scholar’s name and some keywords into Google Scholar.

What counts as a credible website in this tier? You may need some guidance from instructors or librarians, but you can learn a lot by examining the person or organization providing the information (look for an “About” link). For example, if the organization is clearly agenda-driven or not up-front about its aims and/or funding sources, then it definitely isn’t something you want to cite as a neutral authority. Also look for signs of expertise. A tidbit about a medical research finding written by someone with a science background carries more weight than the same topic written by a policy analyst. These sources are sometimes uncertain, which is all the more reason to follow the trail to a Tier 1 or Tier 2 source whenever possible.

10.4.4 Tier 4. Agenda-driven or pieces from unknown sources

This tier is essentially everything else, including Wikipedia. These types of sources—especially Wikipedia—can be hugely helpful in identifying interesting topics, positions within a debate, keywords to search on, and, sometimes, higher-tier sources on the topic. They often play a critically important role in the early part of the research process, but they generally aren’t (and shouldn’t be) cited in the final paper. Throwing some keywords into Google and seeing what you get is a fine way to get started, but don’t stop there. Start a list of the people, organizations, sources, and keywords that seem most relevant to your topic. For example, suppose you’ve been assigned a research paper about the impact of linen production and trade on the ancient world. A quick Google search reveals that (1) linen comes from the flax plant, (2) the scientific name for flax is Linum usitatissimum, (3) Egypt dominated linen production at the height of its empire, and (4) Alex J. Warden published a book about ancient linen trade in 1867. Similarly, you found some useful search terms to try instead of “ancient world” (antiquity, Egyptian empire, ancient Egypt, ancient Mediterranean) and some generalizations for linen (fabric, textiles, or weaving). Now you’ve got a lot to work with as you tap into the library catalog and academic article databases.