Because there are several categories of sources (see Types of Sources), the options you have to meet your information needs can seem complex.

Our best advice is to pay attention to when only primary and secondary sources are required to meet a need and to when only professional and scholarly sources will work. If your research paper is in the arts, also pay attention to when you can or must use popular sources.

These descriptions and summaries of when to use what kind of resource should help.

Get a good look at your topic through background reading.

To Learn Background Information

When you first get a research assignment and perhaps for a considerable time afterward, you will almost always have to learn some background information as you develop your research question and explore how to answer it.

Sources from any category and from any subgroup within a category can meet students’ need to learn background information and understand a variety of perspectives—except journal articles, which are usually too specific to be background. From easy-to-understand to more complex sources, read and/or view those that advance your knowledge and understanding.

For instance, especially while you are getting started, secondary sources that synthesize an event or work of art and tertiary sources such as guidebooks can be a big help. Wikipedia is a good tertiary source of background information.

Sources you use for background information don’t have to be sources that you cite in your final report, although some may be.

One important reason for finding background information is to learn the language that professionals and scholars have used when writing about your research question. (It will help you later, particularly when you’re searching for sources to answer your research question.)

To identify that language, you can always type the word glossary and then the discipline for which you’re doing your assignment in the search engine search box.

Here are two examples to try:

• Glossary neuroscience
• Glossary “social media marketing”

(Putting a phrase in quotes in most search boxes insures that the phrase will be searched rather than individual words.)

Your research question may call for qualitative or quantitative sources.

To Answer Your Research Question

You have to be much more picky with sources to meet this need because only certain choices can do the job. Whether you can use quantitative or qualitative data depends on what your research question itself calls for.

Only primary and secondary sources (from the category called publication mode) can be used to answer your research question and, in addition, those need to be professional and/or scholarly sources for most disciplines (humanities, social sciences, and sciences). But the arts often accept popular sources as primary or secondary sources to answer research questions. Also, the author’s purpose for most disciplines should be to educate and inform or, for the arts, to entertain and perhaps even to sell. (As you may remember, primary sources are those created at the same time as an event you are researching or that offer something original, such as an original performance or a journal article reporting original research. Secondary sources analyze or otherwise react to secondary sources. Because of the information cycle, the latest secondary sources are often the best because their creators’ have had time for better analysis and more information to incorporate.)

If it is not clear to you from the formats of sources you are assigned to read for your course, ask your professor which formats are acceptable to your discipline for answering your research question.

Sources that meet the approval of your audience will be more convincing.

To Describe the Situation

Convincing your audience is similar to convincing yourself and takes the same kinds of sources—as long as your audience is made up of people like you and your professor, which is often true in academic writing. That means using many of those sources you used to answer your research question.

When your audience isn’t very much like you and your professor, you can adjust your choice of sources to meet this need. Perhaps you will include more that are secondary sources rather than primary, some that are popular or professional rather than scholarly, and some whose author intent may not be to educate and inform.

Use sources to frame the situation.

To Describe the Situation

Choosing what kinds of sources you’ll need to meet this need is pretty simple—you should almost always use what’s going to be clear and compelling to your audience. Nonetheless, sources intended to educate and inform may play an out-sized role here.

But even then, they don’t have to educate and inform formally, which opens the door to using sources such as fiction or the other arts and formats that you might not use with some other information needs.

Look for sources about how others have treated your research question.