I’m using this term to mean the expected sources of information agreed upon by the discipline. As an example, historians are expected to use documents from the time (letters, diaries, government documents, newspapers, etc.). Social scientists draw from a different tradition and often use data generated by large, anonymous surveys as evidence. There is, of course, no real limit to such evidence. In general, “traditional evidence” is evidence (data) that is thought of as somehow value-free, which the author then interprets or explains.

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.