Secondary source
A secondary source reports, summarises or analyses what another established. Its real use, its limit, and the trap of the citation chain.
A secondary source reports, summarises, contextualises or analyses information established elsewhere. A news article relaying a study, a dispatch based on a statement, a historian's book working from archives: all are secondary sources.
They are not lesser, they have a different function. A good secondary source does what the primary never does: it situates, compares, flags what is missing, translates a technical text. It is often the only work that makes a raw document mean anything.
The trap is the chain: a site cites an article, which cites another article, which cites a tweet. Every link sheds a nuance, and the error at the start becomes settled fact at the end, apparently confirmed by ten sources that are really one. The practical rule is simple: the more intermediaries between you and the fact, the more you need to walk back up.
Related reading
- Primary sourceGlossary
A primary source produces the information first-hand, with no intermediary. What makes one, and why "primary" does not mean "neutral".
- Fact checkingGlossary
Fact checking means testing a public claim against verifiable sources. Its two forms, its method, and the questions it cannot settle.
- WireGlossary
The wire is the continuous stream of dispatches a news agency sends its clients. How it works, and why the reader never sees it directly.
- How do you verify information?Guides
Get back to the source, date it, cross-check, identify who's speaking: the method newsrooms use, turned into simple steps you can run yourself.
- How do you spot fake news?Guides
Effective false information is rarely a big lie: far more often it's a displaced truth. The mechanisms behind it, the markers to look for and the reflexes that defuse them.