Whenever we write something for school – whether it is a lab report or a literature review – we always have to use the help of literature that is written by other people to back up our own content. However, navigating through the different types of literature sources can be quite the head-scratcher. But worry no more, because I will be walking you through the basic fundamental differences between primary, secondary and tertiary literature.
Peer-reviewed primary literature is the type of literature that our teachers encourage the most for us to cite in our papers for school. Primary literature always conveys the firsthand, contemporary accounts of an event. This type of literature can be described as the sources that are the closest to the origin of the information. In the world of science, this translates to meaning that primary literature consists of original research where the researchers conducted their own experiments or collected their own data and interpreted the results to answer a research question. The work is also reviewed by experts of the same field before being published in a scientific journal, hence why it is called peer-review. An example of a peer-reviewed journal article is: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.ecolsys.32.081501.114037
On the other hand, secondary literature consists of information that originated elsewhere. Secondary literature conveys a secondhand account of events. They interpret, summarize, analyze and draw conclusions from original work, that is, the work done in primary literature. Secondary literature can be quite similar to primary literature as they both can have similar structures (introduction, methods, discussion and conclusion sections), but the key difference lies in that fact that secondary literature will not be about original research work. Secondary literatures are usually literature reviews and books, such as the eBook: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/invasive-species-what-everyone-needs-to-knowrg
Last but not least is Tertiary literature, which consists of summaries and condensed information that has been derived from primary and secondary literature. Tertiary literature does not contain any additional interpretation or analysis of the information, but rather it expresses the information in a generalized manner usually for education and for aiding in providing more simplified information such as key terms. Tertiary literature are usually textbooks, dictionaries and encyclopedias such as the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_species
By Fabbiha Bushra
Applied Plant Ecology Winter 2020 