In the field of history, secondary sources are the scholarly "conversation" taking place about the past.

Secondary sources can include scholarly books, articles, and essays (both analyses by contemporary scholars as well as older scholarly analyses), surveys, criticism, comparative studies, reference sources, and works on theory and methodology.

To identify secondary literature, you can do subject searches in the Library Catalog to find books or subject searches in article indexes/databases to find articles; article databases may list books as well as articles from journals. You can also consult bibliographies.

Other ways of finding relevant secondary sources include looking for review essays, in which a historian who specializes in the subject analyzes recent scholarship and looking for historiographical treatments of the topic published as chapters in collections, journal articles, or even monographs.

Learn more about scholarly communication (AKA secondary sources):

The principal database for identifying journal articles in history are:

There are several other very important article indexes, any of which might be crucial for research depending on the focus of your research:

If you have a citation for a journal article, and you want to obtain a copy of that article, the first step is to check to see if we have online access to the article:

If the Library does not have online access to the journal/article, the next step is to determine whether the Library owns a print copy of the journal. For this, the information you need is the title of the journal, not the title of the article.

If the Library has a print copy of the journal, you can either retrieve it yourself and scan the article, or you can request a scan of the article via Doc Express. If the Library doesn't have the journal at all, you can use Interlibrary Loan to request a scan of the article (library staff will find it at another library and have it scanned for you). This service is quick --it usually only takes a day or two.

Reference works such as encyclopedias, research guides, and bibliographies are an excellent way to find background information and to get an overview of the current scholarship about a topic. (Because of this, they can also help you identify dominant historical narratives.)

Reference works are sometimes considered "tertiary" sources rather than secondary sources, because they usually summarize, condense, or comment upon the secondary literature.

Encyclopedia entries summarize the established state of knowledge in a field of inquiry. An encyclopedia entry is like a digest of the secondary sources on a topic, but rarely reflects the most recent developments in scholarship. Encyclopedia entries typically include suggestions for further reading.

You are using a reference work every time your Google search takes you to a Wikipedia article. Wikipedia is an online, crowdsourced encyclopedia.

Three online reference collections that students often find useful are:

Find encyclopedias on specific topics:

A bibliography is, in its most literal sense, a list of books. Many students are familiar with bibliographies from writing research papers, where a list of works cited is sometimes called a bibliography. In libraries, bibliographies serve an additional, important function in helping patrons identify books, journal articles, and other library resources. These bibliographies are usually centered on sources about a particular subject, and are often book-length themselves. Some bibliographies run to several volumes. For more information on bibliographies, please see our guide to Bibliography and Historical Research:

These collections of bibliographies and handbooks are among the most current and authoritative available:

Basic biographical information can be often be easily obtained using a simple Google search. The biographical encyclopedias listed here may include additional valuable information (such as suggestions for further reading) or they may be worth consulting because of the excellent quality of research on which the entries are based. They may also provide information on individuals with no online presence.