On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 11:47 PM, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
phoebe ayers wrote:
Maybe we need to put more emphasis on "encyclopedia as a tertiary source" -- let other people do the summarizing and the vetting and sorting out of what ideas are going to stick around for the long-term, and focus away from citing original research directly, which helps side-step the danger of representing obscure or untested theory as canonical truth. This might be particularly be true for new scientific discoveries or new ideas in the humanities. (Different perhaps for events in the news, articles about pop culture, etc).
That's generally what I try to do, at least in cases where high-quality summary sources are already available. IMO, if there are well-regarded survey articles, specialist encyclopedias, etc., on a subject, then it's verging on original research to directly cite even secondary sources (e.g. journal articles with original research) to develop a new summary view. I only really resort to citing secondary sources directly on a pragmatic basis if: 1) no good tertiary sources already exist; and 2) the material is either not likely to be controversial, or I've checked that it's corroborated by multiple independent sources.
One of the problems with working from tertiary sources, especially other encyclopedias, is that very often all that can be done is to rewrite what they have said, and even that can verge on plagiarism if not done properly. Citing stuff to the Encyclopedia Britannica (compare citing the current edition to citing the 1911 edition), for instance, or citing stuff to the Dictionary of National Biography.
The ideal is a mix of lots of tertiary and secondary sources. We need to use multiple and independent sources to avoid over-representing or copying a single source (in the sense of 'light rewriting' or 'close paraphrasing'), and to produce something that is distinct and different from that single source. Just tertiary sources alone is not really producing a proper encyclopedic article, and using only secondary sources is not great either. If the secondary source used by another encyclopedia can be accessed and confirmed, then that should also be cited in our article.
This "looking up the sources of the sources" is a problem with some tertiary sources that don't cite their sources. It is also a problem with obscure articles that don't have much written about them out there, so when we summarise here, we are not really adding much value in terms of aggregating different sources, but more repeating what someone else has done.
But re-reading what the three of us have written here, I think we are using slightly different senses of primary, secondary and tertiary. Journal articles are, in many senses, primary sources. I think the confusion arises because you can have "secondary literature", which is different from "secondary sources".
But I agree entirely, that in any area where there is controversy or doubt, defer to the best and most authoritative sources that give an overview of an area, a summary, a text that surveys the literature and does the work for us of giving due weight in at least a reasonably objective fashion. This is usually, but not always, the most recent such publication, though sometimes years of research and publications take place before a new overview text emerges.
Carcharoth