No matter what sources you consult, it's important to understand what you're actually doing with sources when you use them to write a paper. It’s also important to understand why writing papers is such a significant component of your college education. While you may be asked to provide a summary of other people's ideas for some assignments, most of your writing assignments at Harvard will ask you to answer a question or series of questions—either posed by you or posed for you by your instructor. Your answer to a question will generally come in the form of an argument in which you make a claim, marshal evidence to support it, analyze that evidence, and cogently explain to your readers why you have taken this position. The strongest arguments in any field are those that don't simply repeat what has already been said, but instead survey the relevant data, arguments, or documents—i.e., the sources—and, taking those sources into account, offer an original response to the question.
When you consider sources as you seek to answer a research question, you are engaging with the work of scholars in your field and the work that they have written about. By doing so, you are joining the ongoing conversation about ideas that your professors and TFs have introduced you to in lecture and seminar, and that they themselves engage in as they conduct their own research and do their own writing. If you think of your work as playing a part in this larger conversation, it becomes easier to understand what you are doing with sources in your own writing: you are responding to and building on the work that has come before your own.
As you consult sources, you should ask yourself questions about what a source adds to your understanding of a topic and how it might be helpful to you as you write your own paper. For example, a source might help you answer the question you've raised, or it might raise another question for you that suggests a path for further research. A source might influence your thinking about a particular topic or question, but it might also contradict your thinking, which would require you to do more research to figure out how to understand this conflicting point of view.
The question you are trying to answer will determine the types of sources you consider within a specific field, as will the scope of the paper you're writing. For example, if you are writing a close reading paper about a poem, you will likely be expected to focus only on the poem itself. For another assignment, you may be asked to consider how other critics have responded to that poem, and so your sources would be articles by those critics. Similarly, if you are asked to analyze an author’s argument about how to combat climate change, that argument may be your only source—or you may consider that argument in relation to a larger context that includes historical documents, arguments by other scholars, and other sources.
If you are asked to write a literature review paper for a psychology course, your sources will include journal articles that report studies on your topic. If you were writing a senior thesis about the same topic, , you would consider those articles, but you would probably also produce your own raw data through interviews or other studies.
Just as the ideas you develop in a paper will be shaped by your response to the sources you consider, the ideas presented by the scholars you read in your courses are built on their responses to the sources they consulted. This is important to keep in mind as you begin the process of writing papers and as you think about what it means to make an original claim. It's also important to remember that your plans for a paper can—and should—be shaped by what you encounter in a source. You may start out with one assumption and then end up shifting gears when you read something that convincingly challenges that assumption. Or you may find that a source raises a question that prompts you to revisit your original assumption.
For more information on the ways that sources function in a paper, and for advice about how to make them work most effectively in your own paper, consult the section of this guide on integrating sources.