2.6.2.2: Categorizing Sources
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Once you have your research question, you’ll need information sources to answer it and meet the other information needs of your research project.
This section about categorizing sources will increase your sophistication about them and save you time in the long run because you’ll understand the “big picture”. That big picture will be useful as you plan your own sources for a specific research project, which we’ll help you with in the next section Sources and Information Needs.
You’ll usually have a lot of sources available to meet the information needs of your projects. In today’s complex information landscape, just about anything that contains information can be considered a potential source.
Here are a few examples:
With so many sources available, the question usually is not whether sources exist for your project but which ones will best meet your information needs.
Being able to categorize a source helps you understand the kind of information it contains, which is a big clue to (1) whether might meet one or more of your information needs and (2) where to look for it and similar sources.
A source can be categorized by:
As you may already be able to tell, sources can be in more than one category at the same time because the categories are not mutually exclusive.