Q. What is a secondary source? What is secondary research?

Primary sources are original work -- a person's first-hand observations, artistic creation, or research.

Secondary sources and secondary research build upon primary resources by analyzing, interpreting, synthesizing or discussing them.  

A good way to determine whether or not a source you are evaluating is primary or secondary in nature is to ask yourself:

Where does the author's information come from? Is this 'first-hand' information or 'second-hand' information?

If you said 'first-hand' then it is likely a primary source.  If you said 'second-hand', then it's likely a secondary source. 

In news and history, primary sources are first-hand accounts of events, original recordings or creations, etc. Sometimes they are historical documents, but not always. Secondary sources, by contrast, are reports or accounts that rely on having read and analyzed the primary accounts, rather than having actually been present at an event. 

Some examples:

In scholarly literature, we talk about primary research, which is also called empirical research. This is work where the author has conducted research themselves with actual subjects. It could take the form of a scientific experiment, qualitative interviewing, survey data collection, etc. Primary/empirical research typically has a methodology and results.

Secondary research is any scholarly literature where the author has not conducted the research themselves. Common forms of secondary research include:

• Systematic reviews, where the author is reviewing and synthesizing all the available primary literature on a topic (without contributing new research themselves)
• Content analysis or statistical analysis of already-existing data
• Theoretical articles that draw on the existing literature to advance an argument but do not add new research or experimental findings