What Are the Sources of a Scientific Work?

A thesis studies an object by making use of specific instru­ments. Often the object is a book and the instruments are other books. For a thesis on “Adam Smith’s Economic Thought,” the object is Adam Smith’s bibliography, and the instruments are other books on Adam Smith. In this case, we can say that Adam Smith’s writings constitute the pri­mary sources and the writings about Adam Smith are the sec­ondary sources or the critical literature. Naturally, if the topic were “The Sources of Adam Smith’s Economic Thought,” the primary sources would then be the books or other writings that inspired Adam Smith. Certainly historical events (and particular discussions on certain concrete phenomena that Smith may have witnessed) may also have inspired Adam Smith’s work, but these events are nevertheless accessible to us in the form of written material, that is, in the form of other texts.

But there are also cases in which the object is a real phe­nomenon. This would be true for a thesis on the internal migrations of Italians in the twentieth century, the behavior of a group of handicapped children, or an audience’s opin­ion of a current TV program. In these cases, primary sources may not yet exist in an organized written form. Instead you must gather and create your primary documents, including statistical data, interview transcriptions, and sometimes photographs or even audiovisual documents. The critical literature in these cases will not differ greatly from that of our thesis on Adam Smith, although it may consist of news­paper articles and other kinds of documents, instead of books and journal articles.

You must be able to clearly distinguish primary sources from critical literature. The critical literature often reproduces quotes from primary sources, but—as we will see in the next paragraph—these are indirect sources. Moreover, a student conducting hasty and disorderly research can easily mistake the arguments contained in primary sources with those of the critical literature. For example, if I am writing a thesis on “Adam Smith’s Economic Thought” and I notice that I am dwelling on a certain author’s interpretations more than my own direct reading of Smith, I must either return to the source or change my topic to “The Interpretations of Adam Smith in Contemporary English Liberal Thought.” The latter topic will not exempt me from understanding Smith’s work, but my primary interest will be the interpretations of Smith’s work by others. Obviously, an in-depth study of Smith’s critics will require a comparison of their work to the original text.

However, there could be a case in which the original object matters little to me. Suppose I begin a thesis on traditional Japanese Zen philosophy. Clearly I must be able to read Jap­anese, and I cannot trust the few available Western transla­tions. Now suppose that, in examining the critical literature, I become interested in how certain literary and artistic avant- garde movements in the United States made use of Zen in the fifties. At this point, I am no longer interested in under­standing the meaning of Zen thought with absolute theolog­ical and philological accuracy. Instead, I am now interested in how original Oriental ideas have become elements of a West­ern artistic ideology. I will change my topic to “Zen Princi­ples in the ‘San Francisco Renaissance’ of the 1950s,” and my primary sources will become the texts of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and so on. As for my understanding of original Zen philosophy, some reliable critical works and good trans­lations will now suffice. Naturally, this approach assumes that I do not wish to demonstrate that the Californians mis­interpreted the original Zen thought, which would require me to make comparisons with the Japanese originals. But because the Californians loosely based their work on Western translations, I am more interested in their interpretations than in the original philosophy.

This example also illustrates that I should promptly define the true object of my thesis so that I can determine the avail­ability of my sources from the outset. In section 3.2.4, I will demonstrate how to start a thesis from scratch with no pre­conceived bibliography, and how to obtain all the sources I need from a single, small library. Although this procedure is possible, the situation will rarely occur, because realistically I would not choose a topic unless I already knew: (a) where I could find the sources, (b) whether they were easily acces­sible, and (c) whether I was capable of fully understanding them. It would be imprudent of me to accept a thesis on a particular set of James Joyce’s manuscripts without know­ing that they reside at the University of Buffalo, or (if I knew their location) knowing full well that I would never be able to travel to New York. It would be equally unwise to enthusi­astically accept a topic on a private collection of documents belonging to a family that is overly protective of them, and that reveals them only to renowned scholars. And I should not accept a topic that deals with medieval manuscripts, no matter how accessible they are, if I lack the proper training needed to read them.

More realistically, I might agree to study an author only to learn that his original texts are very rare, and that I must travel like a maniac from library to library, or even from country to country. Or I may rely on the fact that microfilms of his complete oeuvre are readily available, forgetting that my department does not own the apparatus to read them, or that I suffer from conjunctivitis and cannot endure such exhausting work. And it would be quite useless for me, if I were studying film at an Italian university, to plan a thesis on a minor work of a director from the 1920s, if I then dis­cover that the only copy of this work resides in the Library of Congress in Washington.

Once the problem of the primary sources is resolved, the same questions arise for the critical literature. I could choose a thesis on a minor eighteenth-century author because the first edition of his work coincidentally resides in my city’s library, but I may then learn that the best critical works on my author are not available at any library to which I have access, and are very expensive to purchase. You cannot avoid this problem by deciding to work only on the sources to which you have access. You must read all of the critical literature, or at least all of it that matters, and you must access the sources directly (see the following paragraph). Otherwise, you should choose another topic according to the criteria described in chapter 2, rather than irresponsibly complete a thesis with unforgivable omissions.

Let us look at some concrete examples from thesis defenses that I have recently attended. In each of these, the authors precisely identified sources that were unquestionably within their range of expertise, verified the availability of these sources, and used them effectively. The first thesis was on “The Clerical-Moderate Experience in the City Hall Admin­istration of Modena (1889-1910).” As the title indicates, the candidate (or the advisor) had precisely defined the scope of the project. The candidate was from Modena, so he could work locally. He discriminated between a general bibliogra­phy and bibliography specifically on the subject of Modena. He may have traveled to other cities for the former, and I assume he was able to work in the city libraries of Modena on the latter. He also divided the primary sources into archival sources and journalistic sources, the latter including relevant articles from contemporary newspapers.

The second thesis was on “The Scholastic Policy of the Italian Communist Party (P.C.I.) from the Formation of the Center-Left (1963) to the Student Protests (1968).” Here too, the student specified the topic with precision and, I would say, prudence, because conducting research on the period after 1968 would have been difficult due to the sheer quantity of sources. The student judiciously chose to focus on the period before 1968, limiting his sources to the offi­cial press of the Communist Party, the parliamentary acts, the party’s archives, and the general press. I have to imag­ine that, no matter how precisely the student researched the general press, some information must have slipped through the cracks due to the amount of coverage involved. Neverthe­less, the general press was unquestionably a valid secondary source of opinions and criticisms. As for the other sources, the official declarations were sufficient to define the Com­munist Party’s scholastic policy. Had the thesis dealt with the scholastic policy of the Christian Democracy, a party in the government coalition, this would have been a very differ­ent story, and the research would surely have assumed dra­matic proportions. On one hand there would have been the official statements, on the other the actual governmental acts that may have contradicted these statements. Take also into account that, if the period had extended beyond 1968, the student would have had to include, among the sources of unofficial opinions, all the publications of the extrapar­liamentary movements that began to proliferate after that period. Once again, the research would have been far more difficult. Finally, I imagine that the candidate had the oppor­tunity to work in Rome, or he was able to have the required material photocopied and sent to him.

The third thesis dealt with medieval history, and was on a seemingly difficult topic. It examined the vicissitudes of the San Zeno Abbey’s estate in Verona during the High Mid­dle Ages. The heart of the work consisted of a transcription, previously never attempted, of certain folios from the San Zeno Abbey’s registry in the thirteenth century. Naturally, the project required some knowledge of paleography, but once the candidate acquired this technique, he only needed to diligently execute the transcription and comment on the results. Nevertheless, the thesis included a bibliography of 30 titles, a sign that the student had historically contextual­ized the specific problem on the basis of previous literature. I assume that the candidate was from Verona and had cho­sen a project that did not involve much travel.

The fourth thesis was titled “Contemporary Drama Perfor­mances in Trentino.” The candidate, who lived in that region of Italy, knew that there had been a limited number of per­formances, and he reconstructed them by consulting news­papers, city archives, and statistical surveys on the audience’s frequency. The fifth thesis, “Aspects of Cultural Policy in the City of Budrio with Particular Reference to the City Library’s Activity,” was similar. These are two examples of projects whose sources are easily available, but that are nevertheless useful because they require a compilation of statistical-socio­logical documentation that will serve future researchers.

A sixth thesis required more time and effort than the others. It illustrates how a student can treat with scien­tific rigor a topic that at first seems appropriate only for an honest literature survey. The title was “The Question of the Actor in Adolphe Appia’s Oeuvre.” Appia is a well-known Swiss author and the subject of abundant historical and the­oretical theater studies that, it would seem, have exhausted all there is to say about him. But the candidate painstak­ingly researched the Swiss archives, along with countless libraries, and explored each and every place where Appia had worked. The student was able to compile an exhaustive bibliography of works on the author, along with the author’s own writings, including minor articles that had been for­gotten shortly after their original publication. This gave the thesis a breadth and precision that, according to the advi­sor, qualified it as a definitive contribution. The student thus went beyond the literature survey by making these obscure sources accessible.

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