To share secondary sources effectively with your research team or readers, you should use a collaborative reference management platform to organize your documents and utilize proper academic citation formats to maintain transparency.
Secondary sources—such as literature reviews, meta-analyses, and academic textbooks—are incredibly valuable because they synthesize broad research topics. Whether you are distributing foundational readings to your lab mates or citing a source within your own manuscript, sharing this literature properly prevents duplicated effort and helps avoid plagiarism.
Sharing Sources with Collaborators
When working on a joint literature review or group project, how you distribute your research materials matters.
- Create a centralized repository: Relying on email threads for PDFs quickly becomes chaotic. Instead, organize your literature using WisPaper's My Library, a Zotero-style manager that lets you store references and use AI to chat with your uploaded papers to quickly pull out key arguments for your co-authors.
- Respect copyright restrictions: Many academic papers are hidden behind paywalls. Instead of illegally sharing copyrighted PDFs, share the metadata. Distribute the DOI (Digital Object Identifier), the abstract, and the citation information so your peers can access the document through their own institutional logins.
- Include annotations: Don't just drop a 50-page review article into a shared folder. Provide context by highlighting key sections, adding tags, or writing a brief note explaining exactly why this secondary source is relevant to your current research gap.
Sharing Secondary Sources in Your Writing
If you are "sharing" a secondary source with your readers by referencing it in your thesis or journal article, you must follow strict formatting guidelines. This usually happens when you want to cite an original idea (primary source), but you only read about it in a review paper (secondary source).
- Track down the primary source first: Always make a genuine effort to find and read the original paper. If you can access it, cite the primary source directly.
- Use the "as cited in" rule: If the original paper is out of print, in a foreign language you cannot read, or otherwise unavailable, you must cite it as a secondary source. In APA format, you would name the original work in your text, but point the reader to the secondary source. For example: (Smith, 1985, as cited in Johnson, 2022).
- Update your reference list: When you use the "as cited in" method, only the secondary source (Johnson, 2022) should appear in your final bibliography. This tells your readers exactly where you found the information, ensuring your academic collaboration and reporting remain fully transparent.
