Secondary Sources

A secondary source is a current book or article written about historical events. Historians keep up with other historians' writings when they write so that they are not re-inventing the wheel. To "do" history, you need to be able to interpret the evidence (primary sources) taking into account what others have written (secondary sources).

You will need to figure out what makes a good secondary source, and how to find them. Now is a good time to review the requirements for your particular paper. How many books do you need? How many articles? See the checksheet for this course. One important thing to remember is that to access most of the research resources listed here, you must go through the UH library electronic resources pages or OneSearch so that you can log in through your UH account. If you go to a database like EBSCOHost or JSTOR (see below) directly or from from google, you will not be able to log in.

A good all purpose starting point is UH's current library search interface, OneSearch. You can get to the simple search page from the library home page, but the link in this paragraph explains OneSearch a little and gives you powerful options right from the start to make your search more productive. Make sure you make use of the various ways of limiting your search once you get the first round of results if you get too many hits to be useful. THe good thing about it is that it provides articles, books and any other kind of source the library has access to all in one place.

Books

Scholarly books generally have footnotes, endnotes, or parenthetical citations. They are usually, though not always, published by a university press. Local public libraries usually do not carry many scholarly books, focusing on popular books instead, so you will need to use the UH library to get books. The best place to find them is in our libraries. Rather than limiting yourself to just UH libraries, You might want to consider starting your search with something bigger: Worldcat, which includes all holdings of all the research library catalogs in the world. You can get to Worldcat by searching for it on the electronic resources page. Make sure you use the OCLC version that you have to log in to, not the free version. I will explain why in a moment.

If you have not done so, open a new browser tab, find a book in Worldcat, and leave the page open. You will be given a lot of useful information which you may not notice at first. If UH has the book, there will be a notice in the "Availability/Libraries worldwide that own item" section that says "UNIV OF HAWAII AT MANOA LIBR." BUT...why not search the UH library system in the first place? If the book is not available at UH, you can obtain it through ILL (Interlibrary loan) right from Worldcat -- it will be a link in the availability section. The OCLC Worldcat (but not the free one) will automagically fill out the ILL form for you. Once you submit it, your book will arrive in about two weeks, at which time the library will send you an email telling you where to pick it up. It is important not to leave your research until the last minute for this reason!

A second thing appears on the address bar if you have Zotero installed and running: a little book icon will appear. Click on that, and your reference will go right into Zotero. Once you have the book, you can take your notes in Zotero, attached to the citation. This way you will never lose track of where you got some piece of information. See the software page if you don't know what Zotero is.

Articles

Where do you find journal articles? The best place to go first is the EBSCOHost start page. That is where you will find access to America: History & Life which covers what is now the continental United States, and Historical Abstracts which covers the rest of the world. You can choose both at once and many more from the start page. Usually these two will cover your needs, but sometimes, especially for some Native American topics or special interests, another EBSCOHost database like anthropology or music might help out too. You can change databases at any time at the top of the EBSCOHost search page. EBSCOHost includes results from JSTOR, and some from Project Muse, but often a separate search of these will yield more results if you strike out on EBSCOHost because they include the full texts of all the articles in their databases in their searches, while EBSCOHost only searches the metadata, the bibliographical information. Be careful with JSTOR though, because it does not include the newest articles (generally from the last five years) and does include really old stuff even back to the 1850s which can be out of date, wrong, and often somewhat racist, particularly in regard to Native Americans or African Americans. Nonetheless, sometimes old articles can be useful. Use your critical skills and judgment to decide.

After you have done your initial book and article searches, there are a couple of additional databases that can be useful. The Web of Science database and Google Scholar can both be helpful because they show how many times an article has been cited since publication and what those citing publications are. Other databases will probably add this functionality, so look out for it. This can be helpful in finding out how important an older article is, and if it is important, what has been written since it came out, giving you a way to bring yourself up to date. Neither does this perfectly, and Web of Science in particular is a pain to use, but you can find newer material from older material this way sometimes.

Book reviews are not articles and do not count as articles on the checksheet, so it helps if you set the search parameters to search only for articles. Often to do this, you have to go to the advanced search page, which will provide you with many other ways of limiting a search. Book reviews can be useful to find out whether a book will be useful to you, but you need to get the book, not rely on the review.

If you find an article that does no have the full text online, you need to check and see if we have a paper copy of the journal in the library. If we do not, you need to ILL it. That can be done from within America History & Life and maybe from the other databases too, just like for Worldcat. Journal article ILLs are now free and usually come within a few days in the form of an adobe pdf file that will be linked to from an email sent to you by the library. Do your secondary searches early so that you have plenty of time to ILL.

On citing these journals: Unless it is an online-only journal, you do not need the URL. Usually the URL that you land on for an article will be dependent on your particular login, and I am not going to type a twenty yard long web address. The idea is to provide me with information that allows me to get to your source, and there is already enough without the URL.

Web Sites

You may use web sites, but be careful. Who is the author and what is that author's authority? Is it Joe the paramilitary dude from Idaho's blog? A K-12 teacher writing for 7th graders? A member of the Man-Boy Love Association? All of these have crossed my desk as "sources" and each is problematic for a college course for different reasons. Look for published authors or professors talking about their specialty. Sometimes a blog can supply good information, especially if they are providing primary sources, but tread carefully. Look for .edu sites, but careful there, because if you don't check, you might be getting a student's "C" paper, or the bloviation of an out of touch professor who has not read anything for twenty years. Pay attention!

Wikipedia, Encarta, Anyotherpedia: You can start your inquiry here, but look at what their sources are and (a) see if they are valid (Wikipedia in particular often uses outdated sources ), and (b) if valid go to those sources rather than relying on Wikipedia. It is generally good for names and dates, but this is a college course and you need to dig deeper. References to encyclopedias (or any other lousy source) will earn you the new grade of "G" for "just Googled it." "G" as you know, comes right after "F."

One great web resource that our library has is the online Oxford English Dictionary, which you can also get to by searching for it on the electronic resources page. This is the 30+ volume dictionary with historical usages of words, so if you find a word that doesn't sound right. Remember the silly fort? Or the Indians who thought they were brave for wearing shells that made noise on their clothes? Those words had different meanings in the seventeenth century than they do now. The OED shows how the meanings have changed over time using actual quotations.

Finally check the guide to footnoting for how to cite a web page. Just the URL is not enough.

Other?

I am open to non-traditional sources such as artifacts, interviews, or oral histories. See me if you plan on using these types of sources.

Citing

See the guide to footnoting for what gets cited how. Zotero should do most of this for you, but sometimes you have to massage your Zotero entry to get it right, and to do that you need to know what is what in a citation.