Source literature (understood as printed texts) is a kind of
information source. It might, for example, be cited and used as
source
Source may refer to:
Research
* Historical document
* Historical source
* Source (intelligence) or sub source, typically a confidential provider of non open-source intelligence
* Source (journalism), a person, publication, publishing institute o ...
s 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'' 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for example, publish important sources to be used by historians and other scholars as reliable editions of formerly unpublished sources.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 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
*
Sourcebook
A sourcebook is a collection of writings on a subject that is intended to be a basic introduction to the topic presented.
Academic use
In American universities, a sourcebook, either a standard one or a custom collection, may function as a supplem ...
*
Primary source
In the study of history as an academic discipline, a primary source (also called an original source) is an artifact, document, diary, manuscript, autobiography, recording, or any other source of information that was created at the time under ...
*
Secondary source
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