It would be best if you researched the topic before start writing your dissertation. You must write your dissertation effectively if you want to graduate with distinction. The main factor that impacts on your dissertation is the information that you include in your discussion. As a researcher, you must know what sources are useful and when to use them in dissertation writing.

Secondary and tertiary sources are the most common and easy-to-use sources in dissertation writing. Students don’t have a clear understanding of when they should use a secondary source or when they use tertiary sources for writing a dissertation. Before stepping forward, you should have to understand what are secondary sources and tertiary sources.

What Are Secondary Sources?

These sources provide you with previously owned information because the information present in the secondary sources is paraphrased, analysed, explained, or rewritten from the original information by other researchers. Here is the list of sources that are used as secondary sources:

• Journals
• Scholarly publications
• Articles
• Government documents
• Research papers
• Dissertations
• Essays

What Are Tertiary Sources?

A tertiary source is sometimes referred to as a reference work because it summarises the information that you obtained from primary and secondary sources without providing new perspectives, findings, recommendations, and analysis. Here is the list of sources that are used as tertiary sources:

• Reference book
• Encyclopedia
• Index
• Bibliography
• Timelines
• Review articles
• Textbooks
• Records
• Wikipedia

Now let’s start with the discussion. This article will assist you with when to use secondary and tertiary sources for dissertation writing.

When To Use Secondary Sources For Dissertation Writing?

Getting information from secondary sources for your dissertation writing is very easy and time-effective. You may simply find a variety of sources on the internet that are published by various researchers from where you can collect information and data about your research topic. You must understand the concepts and ideas about the topic by collecting information from these various sources.

Secondary sources provide you with an opportunity to understand the topic by knowing how other researchers analyse and explain the concepts. The following points that show when to use secondary sources are given below:

• When you don’t have much time to conduct proper research from primary sources, you should use secondary sources to gather literature about your topic.
• When you find it difficult to interpret and analyse the raw information by yourself due to limited time for the submission, you should use secondary sources. Using secondary sources you can find interpreted data about your topic, which will be useful for your dissertation writing.
• Suppose your topic doesn’t cover only raw information. You need to include different opinions of different researchers to prove your argument. Also, if you want to present the analysis using the interpretation of other researchers, you should use secondary sources for your research. By collecting different ideas from particular sources, you may able to give your analysis basis on that information and concepts.
• When you find it difficult to gather the information and data from their sources, use secondary sources to collect that information for dissertation writing.

When To Use Tertiary Sources For Dissertation Writing?

You can find useful information for dissertation writing using tertiary sources. This useful information may include key terminologies, lists of reference materials, detailed descriptions, and explanations of the concepts and ideas. Like secondary sources, you do not collect information and data on the literature about the topic from tertiary sources. You can collect relevant information about the topic using tertiary sources that direct you toward the other sources. Here are the following points that show when to use tertiary sources:

• When you want to authorise the background information about the topic for your research, you can use tertiary sources for this purpose.
• Dissertation writing highly depends on the key terminologies and explanations of different concepts about the topic. So for the collection of these terminologies, definitions of different terms, explanations of various concepts, and detailed summaries use tertiary sources.
• You need to include the list of references at the end of your dissertation. So to find the references of your materials, you should use tertiary sources. But, if you cannot create the list of references, you must hire dissertation writing services UK. Their experts will help you to find perfect references.

Conclusion

Dissertation writing requires you to perform research to collect information about your topic. You should use secondary sources as well as tertiary sources for this purpose. These sources provide you with enough information so that you can easily write your dissertation without any errors. But the question that arises here is when you should use secondary sources for the research or when you should use tertiary sources for writing a dissertation. To avoid this problem, it would be best if you made sure of the requirements to know when to use secondary or tertiary sources for the research.

Read: Writing a Dissertation Methodology: Structure and Formatting