Information that has been drawn from other articles, magazines, or books rather than from the original documents, often located in archives. The usual distinction is that secondary evidence usually involves someone’s interpretation of primary sources. There is a potential complication, however: Depending on how an author uses the evidence, articles, books, newspapers, radio or TV programs can be either primary or secondary sources for an article.

A Guide to Reading and Analyzing Academic Articles, by Amanda Graham, 1997-2012, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.