Defintion of Secondary Research
- id: 1685547732
- Date: April 1, 2024, 3:43 p.m.
- Author: Donald F. Elger
Secondary Research: Definition
Secondary research is the act of getting information from other people by reading books, watching online videos, listening to lectures, asking questions, reading web articles, reading journal articles, using Wikipedia, and so forth.
Rationale
There are several reasons why being good at secondary research matters.
Any problem you want to solve has already been solved, at least in part. All you have to do access the solution is to find the relevant information, and apply it. This makes you a much better problem solver and saves huge amounts of time.
You’ll seem super smart, but this only because you can find great information that people around you don’t know. Thus, they’ll think you are wise when it is really the case that you are good at secondary research.
Effective primary research is based on doing effective secondary research first. In addition, you cannot be good at primary research unless you are first good at secondary research. Those who lack skills in secondary research often will get information via primary research and spend huge amount of extra time as in 2 years of work instead of 2 week weeks of work.
Secondary Research (How To)
Present State. You have recognized that information would be useful. You have generated high-quality focus questions.
Goal State: You have good information: true, accurate, completete, easy-to-understand, and justified. This information was found with minimum amounts of work, maximum amount of learning. You have documentation that is high quality: information is easy to (create, access, update, delete, reorganize, share, and use) for many years after your work was done. You have citations.
Path: To move from the present state to the goal state, take the following actions.
- Get a few high quality sources of information.
- Figure out the information and documentment it in your own words using the ZettelKasten method or some method that is better. Include all citations.
- If quality is high enough, stop. Otherwise loop back to step 1.
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