Grainger Graduate Assistant STEM Information Literacy Training

Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Information

Primary information is information that is collected concurrently in time with an event. In the case of scientific and technical information, primary information is collected at the time of the innovation or experiment. The most common and authoritative type of primary scientific information is that of the laboratory notebook. Laboratory notebooks serve multiple purposes.

• They ensure historical record keeping to facilitate ongoing research.
• They ensure orderly iteration of experiments and track outcomes of those iterations, including changes in variable and methodology. 
• They allow for reproducibility - the ability to recreate an experiment in order to assure the quality and accuracy of the findings. This is a key component of the scientific method.
• They certify dates of discovery for the purpose of intellectual property and serve as prior art for patent applications.

Laboratory notebooks can be in print or in electronic.  Specific software is used to ensure that electronic lab notebooks cannot be edited to adjust the date and time stamp so that they can serve as prior art (to be discussed in more depth in a future module.) 

Primary art can also include interpersonal communication in the form of handwritten documents, emails, text messages, and other documented communications.  At the time of a new and novel finding, other documents such as an internal report can also serve as a primary source of information. 

Secondary Information is information that is publicly reported as an authoritative source on the initial findings. The most prominent source of secondary information in STEM disciplines is the pre-print. Discussion papers, white papers and technical reports are also relatively frequent first public disclosure venues.  Conferences and conference proceedings have traditionally served as the first point of presentation of new findings to peer audiences. Patents can serve as secondary information in that they disclose the novel changes that happened in the course of the initial discovery. 

Tertiary information is information from multiple public sources that is synthesized to draw broad conclusions or to detail trends over time.  Handbooks, standards, and patents are all common tertiary sources of information in that they collocate findings from across sources to develop a central access point for information, a consensus on the test methods, materials, or procedures involved in the original findings, or certify the differences with existing designs through patent citation. 

Primary Technical Information

Laboratory notebooks: Laboratory notebooks are rarely made available to anyone outside of the individual laboratory due to intellectual property reasons. Emails and interpersonal communications may not be made publicly available until years or decades later with the exception of patent priority claims, which require that the evidence of priority (first discovery) be demonstrated through the patent process. Decades of years after the initial discovery, laboratory notebooks and interpersonal communications may be made available through the author's archive, generally associated with the institution where they were employed. Thus, newspaper articles and daily media are frequently the only accessible record of primary findings. Due to the nature of STEM discovery, it is unlikely to find newspaper articles for individual projects, unlike in the humanities (history, literature, etc.). 

Patents: Patents are certification of intellectual property. The process of applying for a patent requires the demonstration of novelty or newness, which requires demonstrating the existing ideas as well as the innovation that built upon or differed from them. Patents are the rare documents that can serve as primary literature, in that it demonstrates the innovation process from the viewpoint of the inventor and secondary literature in that it synthesizes existing findings from multiple other sources to demonstrate novelty.

Secondary Technical Information

A variety of secondary technical information is made available.

Pre-prints: Individual disciplines have different disciplinary norms for pre-print publication. ArXiv is a major cross-disciplinary pre-print server, but there are many others as well. A relatively comprehensive list of pre-print repositories can be found at Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR). For researchers who are determining which repository is most appropriate for their publication, the COAR Repositories by Function list can be a useful tool to prioritize the features of a given repository. Similar secondary technical information types discussion papers, technical papers and white papers are frequently published in repositories as well.

Conference proceedings:Conference proceedings are published at the conclusion of an in-person or online conference. Some conferences feature peer review processes. Others do not. Conference proceedings are made available through the publisher of the initial conference, or are made electronically available through large aggregator publishers. Many conference proceedings are not retrospectively digitized. To find conference proceedings, title level searches in WorldCat are generally successful for newer conference proceedings. For older proceedings (circa 2005 and earlier) searching the title and year of the conference itself in WorldCat to ensure more accurate returns. 

Technical reports: Technical reports are considered grey literature, in that they are not consistently indexed and that they can be hard to discover holdings for even if the existence of the citation can be confirmed. Many technical reports are indexed in Federal repositories such as NTIS (National Technical Information Server) and discoverable through Science.gov. 

Scholarly journal articles: Scholarly journal articles are a type of secondary technical information that has been the primary vector for information dissemination across academic . Disciplinary databases, particularly citation indexes, make the items discoverable through features such as linked metadata and implementation of controlled vocabulary. Social media is used to disseminate the existence of the articles as well.  

Trade publications: Trade publications are peer developed magazines for those within a given industry. These publications focus on practitioner needs and are a place where innovative products and techniques are disseminated.  Trade publications can be found in business databases such as Business Source Ultimate, or in the library catalog. 

Tertiary Technical Information

Handbooks:Handbooks are compilations of reference materials and data.  Originally intended to meet information gaps of practicing engineers and scientists, handbooks are intended to provide point of use access to common STEM information including equations, materials properties and data, protocols, standards, and other factual information. Modern handbooks are very narrowly scoped to individual topics, where older handbooks were commonly general to the needs of a specific field. Handbooks can be found through Alma or through databases such as Access Engineering and ChemNetBase. 

Standards: Standards are authoritative documents that are developed by committees of experts to establish common understandings of procedures, test methods, and specifications to facilitate interoperability and quality control . Standards are secondary in that they are developed by practitioners based upon existing research.  Standards are generally available by purchase only (held behind paywalls) and many have restrictive licenses that limit use of an electronic edition to one computer. Therefore, standards can be both expensive to access and hard to find in the public domain. Consensus standards (those that have been adopted by governmental agencies as practice for their employees, contractors, and relevant industries) can be found through searches of .gov websites. 

Encyclopedias:

Encyclopedias are compendiums of information on specific topics, arranged in alphabetical order. Encyclopedias are generally the last type of information to be developed, in that not only is the scientific consensus established prior to the information being recorded in an encyclopedia, the majority of the topics in an encyclopedia are written at a lower technical level, thereby making it more accessible to individuals who are outside of the field of study. Encyclopedias can be widely found and accessed via library catalogs and some databases, such as Access Science. 

Textbooks: Textbooks are the most common tertiary source type in academia.  Textbooks are widely available but generally pay-walled.  The ability of a library to access a textbook for a patron depends upon the publisher, the license on the work, and collection policies of the library itself. Textbooks are treated as monographs and therefore are searchable within Alma or WorldCat.  For current editions of textbooks, frequently students must pay to purchase or borrow them from the publisher.  Faculty can request courtesy copies of textbooks from the publisher to make determinations regarding whether they would like to use that textbook for their course. 

Active Learning Module

In pairs, from the assorted materials on this cart, select items that you would use to demonstrate the concepts of primary, secondary and tertiary literature in a class.  Make notes on the characteristics of the information that are included in the item that indicate which type of publication it is and then reflect on  why it is considered primary, secondary, or tertiary. Develop talking points highlighting your observations that you could use to present the concept to a STEM undergraduate class.