#  Secondary sources  

 



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 As described in the Harvard College Writing Center’s *[A brief guide to writing the History Paper](https://hwpi.harvard.edu/files/hwp/files/bg_writing_history.pdf)*, “Secondary sources are materials produced after the time period under study; they consider the historical subject with a degree of hindsight and generally select, analyze, and incorporate evidence (derived from primary sources) to make an argument. Works of scholarship are the most common secondary source.”

##  Typical secondary sources in the Classics will be: 

- Books or monographs
- Scholarly articles, including reviews
- Commentaries, dictionaries, and other reference sources
- Archaeological site reports
- Anything interpretative
- Scholia: Scholia are grammatical, critical, or explanatory notes on ancient texts made by premodern authors; they can be separated from the works they address by decades, centuries, or a millennium. Your specific project will determine if scholia are a primary or secondary source.