If you’re doing any kind of research you will of course need sources! There’s a couple different kinds of sources, all with their own uses depending on your level of research and what kind of project you are doing. The three types of sources are primary, secondary and tertiary.
Primary
These provide firsthand evidence and are created by someone who was there in the moment. These usually aren’t scholarly but they are of great use for research! For cosplay there’s lots of things this covers but in general if it is content produced by a cosplayer this will more than likely be a primary source.
Includes:
- Photos
- Convention summaries from attendees
- Tutorials/How to Guides
- Snaps/Tweets/Most social media posts
- Interviews
- Cosplayer or photographer webpages
- Cosplayer produced books
- Editorials in magazines
- Some Newspaper articles
- Theses/studies involving direct observation
Secondary
These provide analysis of/or comment on primary sources and may contain pictures or quotes with commentary on them. These can be scholarly but are not always. There’s a lot less of this out there for cosplay, especially of the scholarly variety, but there’s more and more published each year!
Includes:
- Journal articles (both scholarly and not)
- Textbooks
- Books/articles about the history of cosplay
- Books/articles about the cosplay community
- Books or articles about the effects of cosplay on a cosplayer or community
- A general magazine of newspaper article about cosplay as a whole but not covering a specific event.
- Bibliography of primary sources
Tertiary
These use or identify primary & secondary sources to summarize a topic. These are great to familiarize yourself with a topic but that’s it. There’s not much out there for tertiary sources on cosplay but since you want to write about cosplay you probably already have a general idea about it anyways.
Includes:
- Bibliographies (like Cosbrary!)
- Abstracts
- Encyclopedias
- Fact books
- Textbooks
- Anything that is short and summarizes.
So what type of sources should you use?
Primary sources are important in research projects or papers about cosplay because they provide concrete data and examples about what you are talking about. An article or a thesis by a researcher who observed/interacted with cosplayers is going to be your best source of objectively scholarly primary sources so if your professor says you need 3 scholarly sources these would count towards that. Photos, interviews and tutorials like Kamui’s books are not scholarly but can provide raw material for your own research and real life examples you can cite. These are useful but won’t count towards your scholarly sources.
The bulk of what you’ll use towards any requirement of scholarly or peer-reviewed sources when it comes to cosplay are secondary sources. This is especially true of undergraduate or high school students! These materials take raw data and analyze it. Most journal articles regarding cosplay will fall into this category (if you are a science major you may be used to articles being primary sources as those are often empirical studies). Many books about cosplay, both scholarly and not, also fall into this category.
If you are in high school, college, university or grad school usually the only reason you will use tertiary sources is to give yourself bearing or to familiarize yourself with atopic before continuing on. If you are doing a literature review or another specialized project you may need to include tertiary sources. Always consult with a librarian or your professor if you are unsure!
Cosbrary 