Direct and Indirect Sources of Primary and Secondary Data of the thesis

Regarding books, a direct source is an original edition or a critical edition of the work in question.

A translation is not a direct source: it is instead a prosthetic like dentures or a pair of glasses. It is a means by which I gain limited access to something that lies outside my range.

An anthology is not a direct source: it is a stew of sources, useful only for a first approach to the topic. If I write a thesis on a particular author, my goal is to see in him what others have not, and an anthology only provides someone else’s view.

The critical works of other authors, no matter how rich with quotations, are not direct sources: at best, they are indirect sources.

Indirect sources can take many forms. If the subject of my thesis is the Italian communist politician Palmiro Togliatti, the parliamentary speeches published by the newspaper Unita constitute an indirect source, because there is no as­surance that the newspaper has not made edits or mistakes. Instead, the parliamentary acts themselves constitute a di-rect source. If I could locate an actual text written by Togliatti himself, I would have the ultimate direct source. If I want to study the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, the only direct source is the origi­nal document. However, a good photocopy can also be con­sidered a direct source. I can also use as a direct source the critical edition by a historiographer of undisputed rigor, if I define “undisputed” to mean that his edition has never been challenged by other critical works. Clearly the concepts of “direct” and “indirect” sources depend on my perspective and the approach that I take for my thesis. If I wish to dis­cuss the political meaning of the Declaration of Indepen­dence in my thesis, a good critical edition will be more than adequate. If I want to write a thesis on “The Narrative Struc­tures in The Betrothed,” any edition of Alessandro Manzoni’s novel will suffice. Instead, my thesis might be called “Man­zoni’s Linguistic Transformation from Milan to Florence.” It would explore the novel’s linguistic change from the blend of Lombard vernacular and traditional literary language of the 1827 edition to the contemporary Florentine of the 1840 edition. In this case, my thesis would require a good critical edition of each version of the novel.

Let us then say that my sources should always be direct, within the limits set by the object of my research. The only absolute rule is that I should not quote my author through another quote. In theory, a rigorous scientific work should never quote from any quote, even if the material that I wish to quote is from someone other than the object of my thesis. Nevertheless, there are reasonable exceptions, especially for a thesis. For example, if you choose “The Question of the Tran­scendental Nature of Beauty in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae,” your primary source will be Thomas Aquinas’s Summa. Let us say that Marietti’s currently available edition is sufficient, unless you suspect that it betrays the original, in which case you must return to other editions. (In this case your thesis will have a philological character, instead of an aesthetic/philosophical character.) You will soon discover that Aquinas also addresses the transcendental nature of beauty in his Commentary to Pseudo-Dionysius’s De divinis nominibus (The Divine Names), and you must address this work as well, despite your thesis’s restrictive title. Finally you will discover that Aquinas’s work on this theme drew from an entire religious tradition, and that researching all of the original sources would take a scholar his entire career. You will also discover that such a work already exists, and that its author is Dom Henry Pouillon who, in this vast work of his, quotes large passages from all the authors who commented on Pseudo-Dionysius and illuminates the relationships, ori­gins, and contradictions of these commentaries. Within the scope of your thesis, you can certainly use the material Pouil- lon gathered each time you refer to Alexander of Hales or Hilduin. If you come to realize that Alexander of Hales’ text becomes essential for the development of your argument, then you can consult the Quaracchi edition of the direct text, but if you only need to refer to a short quote, it will suffice to declare that you found the source through Pouillon. Nobody will fault you because Pouillon is a rigorous scholar, and because the text you quoted indirectly through him was not central to your thesis.

What you should never do is quote from an indirect source pretending that you have read the original. This is not just a matter of professional ethics. Imagine if someone asked how you were able to read a certain manuscript directly, when it is common knowledge that it was destroyed in 1944! This being said, you need not get caught up in “direct source neurosis.” The fact that Napoleon died on May 5, 1821 is common knowledge, usually acquired through indirect sources, such as history books written on the basis of other history books. If you wish to study the precise date of Napoleon’s death, you would need to locate original documentation. But if you wish to address the influence of Napoleon’s death on the psychol­ogy of European liberal youth, you can trust the date that appears in any history book. After you declare that you are citing an indirect source in your thesis, it may be prudent to check other indirect sources to determine the accuracy of a certain quote, or the reference to a certain fact or opinion. If you find inconsistencies that raise suspicion, you can either choose not to quote the data, or search for the direct source.

For example, since we have already mentioned St. Thom­as’s aesthetic thought, let us note that a number of recent texts that discuss this topic assume that St. Thomas said the following: “pulchrum est id quod visum placet.” Since I wrote my own thesis on this topic, I consulted the original texts and noticed that St. Thomas had never said that. Instead, he said, “pulchra dicuntur quae visa placent,” and I will not go into the details of why the two formulations can lead to very different interpretations. What had happened? Many years ago the philosopher Jacques Maritain had proposed the first formulation, thinking he was faithfully summarizing St. Thomas’s thought. Since then, other scholars have referred to Maritain’s formulation (which Maritain had drawn from an indirect source), without bothering to check the original.¹

The same issue arises in regard to bibliographical entries. In a rush, you may decide to include in your bibliography sources you have not read; you may discuss these works in footnotes, or what’s worse, in the body of the text, all along drawing from information that you gathered indirectly. For example, you may find yourself writing a thesis on the baroque; having read Luciano Anceschi’s article “Bacone tra Rinascimento e Barocco” (Bacon between the Renaissance and baroque), in Da Bacone a Kant (From Bacon to Kant) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1972), you cite this article in a note and then, to make a good impression, you add the following com­ment: “For other acute and stimulating observations on the same topic see Id., ‘L’estetica di Bacone’ (Bacon’s aesthetics), in L’estetica dell’empirismo inglese (The aesthetic of English empiricism) (Bologna: Alfa, 1959).” However, since you have not actually read “L’estetica di Bacone,” and you are simply mentioning a text that you saw referenced in a note, you will make a terrible impression when a professor points out that the two articles are one and the same, “L’estetica di Bacone” having been published 13 years before “Bacone tra Rinasci­mento e Barocco” in a more limited edition.

These observations are also valid if the object of your the­sis is a current event rather than a series of texts. If I want to address the reactions of farmers from Romagna to a particular set of TV news programs, a primary source will be the survey I conduct in the field, interviewing a reliable and adequate sam­ple of farmers according to defined rules. If not this, I should at least use as my primary source a recent analogous survey published by a reliable source. Clearly I would be at fault if I relied on ten-year-old research, if nothing else because both the farmers and the TV news programs have changed signifi­cantly over the past decade. However, this research might be appropriate for a thesis titled “Studies on the Relationship between the Audience and Television in the Sixties.”

Source: Eco Umberto, Farina Caterina Mongiat, Farina Geoff (2015), How to write a thesis, The MIT Press.