Secondary sources are scholarly materials created after an event or time period, and which offer discussion or analysis of that event or period of time. Secondary sources usually use primary sources to make an argument. For your purposes, secondary sources will likely take the form of magazine or newspaper articles written after the time, videos, single-topic nonfiction books (called monographs) or journal articles.
Here is a video that shows you how to search the Putnam Library catalog. Make the video full screen to see it better.
If you need help searching, check out the search tips below the video or on our "Research Tips" page.
The library's databases include many types of secondary sources, but they primarily focus on journal articles. Journal articles are pieces of scholarly writing published in academic journals. They can vary in length, but are often the equivalent of a chapter in a non-fiction book. Scholarly journal articles are peer-reviewed, make an argument, and cite their sources. Journal articles are especially helpful for finding information about a narrow topic, reading a scholar’s arguments, getting an overview of several scholars’ arguments about a topic, and finding more resources on a topic.
You can also find scholarly journal articles in many of our other databases. Look for the keywords "Academic Journals", "Peer-Reviewed Articles", or "Scholarly Articles".
Check out the Quick Links box to the right to see all of the library's databases.
EBSCO Discovery Service allows you to search all of our databases at one time. It is a great tool, but is very powerful and will likely return many results, and so may be overwhelming. We recommend waiting to use it until you are familiar with your topic and you have an idea what you need to search for.
