Discover research materials

How to access primary and secondary resources

Through the library, you have direct access to books and other printed materials and also to a vast set of online sources to which the library subscribes. Your research will also lead you to explore a much wider of online collections, databases and corpora, using dedicated search strategies.

There is also guidance provided by the library on resources of particular relevance to language subjects.

Primary sources

A typical primary source is a text that is addressed in class and works by the same writer or comparable texts from the same context would also be primary sources. A collection of data is also a primary source, for instance, if you are writing about language change. And if you are writing about a historical or cultural moment, there is a still wider range of primary sources on which you could draw, including newspaper articles, film clips that include archival footage as well as more recent film and documentary material, websites containing archival material, podcasts and interviews in print. So, a primary source can be a text or artefact directly produced in the context that you are studying; in other words, it can be contemporary with the topic or period in question, or can be a literary text or other form of cultural production from this period.

In the case of primary sources, think carefully about the kind of material in question: to what end was this source produced? to whom is a given source addressed? What message or messages might a source have been intended to convey? How representative is a source as a means of documenting and understanding a period or historical event? Where relevant, comment on the medium in which a source was produced — e.g. a film, a news reel, a photograph, a poster, a mass-produced text or image, song lyrics (with or without original music).

Secondary sources

Academic books, essays and articles are typical secondary sources. You will receive guidance on relevant materials in class and you can carry out your own searches to locate further sources that help to you to address a particular issue in your own writing. You can initiate your searches from the library homepage.

A secondary source draws on one or more primary sources to provide a historical, interpretative or critical account of a historical period or a form of cultural production.

Make sure carefully to document the sources of any documents you use, primary or secondary: in your written work, you must give specific references to sources that you use. When reading sources, take notes to assist you in retrieving references that you will need in documenting your sources in your own written work.

In using secondary sources, aim to identify the main claims or conclusions made by the author or authors — are the claims and conclusions based on specific sources? How well founded do you consider the claims or conclusions in a secondary work to be in the light of the sources cited and of your own reading drawing on other sources?

Online resources

You can also avail of a range of important research tools, notably corpora, which are large scale collections of linguistic data, sometimes spanning more than one language.

These tools often provide interfaces that allow you to carry out detailed lexical investigations. It is a good idea to use a reference manager to keep track of resources like these (though it should be noted that these and other web addresses, or URLs, are liable to change over time.

Reference sources

You also have access to a wide range of authoritative reference resources and you should as a rule make use of these rather than drawing on webpages that happen to appear among the results of an internet research. One example of such a source is Oxford Reference Online, to which you have access through the library.

Open access

Alongside the many sources of knowledge and information to which the University subscribes, you can also make use of open-access materials, in other words, research sources that are available online free of charge and without restrictive licensing conditions.

Open-access is an increasingly important way of availing of current research and a wide range of open-access outlets now exists in several European languages. You can also explore open-access journals and in addition UCC maintains its own institutional repository of open-access research.