Secondary sources are sources that comment upon, analyze, or compile primary sources. If you aren't sure if what you've found is a primary or secondary sources, think about the author and the purpose of the source. If the author is commenting upon another work or set of works, than it can be used as a secondary source! You will want to focus on academic secondary sources that provide scholarly analysis of primary sources from a given country.

Academic books are most often written by scholars, and provide a broad scholarly analysis of a topic, time, place, phenomenon, or theory. Academic books usually are written for other researchers, students, or scholars. These books are usually in academic libraries and not easy to find at regular bookstores.

Peer-reviewed articles are also written by scholars or experts in a field, but their audience is often more limited. They are written in language that is usually discipline-specific - to sociology, history, or other fields. These peer-reviewed articles are published by professional or scholarly associations and are almost always only accessible via academic libraries!

Use NUSearch to find academic secondary sources that focus on primary sources.

You can use the same techniques we used to find reference entries, including combining keywords and using "OR" and "AND" to combine words together, to find secondary academic sources. I'm going to give you an example to work with.

So here, we're doing a more specific set of search keywords to get a more focused group of results. I picked a topic within a country to make the search results more specific to what I'm interested in investigating!

On the left-navigation side, you can limit the results by language, to specify books (many are currently available online), or peer-reviewed journal articles (vast majority available online).