Source literature (understood as printed texts) is a kind of
information source. It might, for example, be cited and used as
sources in academic writings, and then called the literature on the subject.
The meaning of "source literature" is relative. From the point of view of a bibliographic index the indexed papers are "source literature". For example, the ''
Social Sciences Citation Index
The Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) is a commercial citation index product of Clarivate Analytics. It was originally developed by the Institute for Scientific Information from the Science Citation Index. The Social Sciences Citation Index is ...
'' is a "source index" covering the journals being indexed. These journals are the source literature from the point of view of this index. But from the point of view of the indexed papers they are the bibliographical references contained in the single papers "source literature".
In the humanities, the term "source literature" has a more precise meaning than "published sources": Many archives, for example, publish important sources to be used by historians and other scholars as reliable editions of formerly unpublished sources. The publishing of such sources requires knowledge of text philology and other fields. But this kind of expertise put into the publishing of source literature should be differentiated from the kind of expertise needed in order to use the sources in, for example, historical research. A historian may or may not use such "source literature" and on the basis of his research publish a paper, which in the
UNISIST model The UNISIST model of information dissemination was proposed in 1971 by the United Nations. UNISIST (United Nations International Scientific Information System) is a model of the social system of communication, which consists of knowledge producers, ...
is considered primary literature.
Søndergaard, Andersen and Hjørland (2003) thus suggest that source literature is a distinct kind of literature to be distinguished from primary literature.
See also
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Sourcebook
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Primary source
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References
* Trine Fjordback Søndergaard, Jack Andersen and Birger Hjørland (2003)
''Documents and the communication of scientific and scholarly information. Revising and updating the UNISIST model'' "Journal of Documentation", 59 (3), pp. 278–320.
Library science terminology