Books
There are several kinds of books that will be valuable for your research project, and several kinds that, if used, might backfire. In other instances, you’ll have to use your judgment.
Citing a standard single-authored book looks like this (from SFU Library’s mini Chicago guide):
Footnote
Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries (Toronto: Random House of Canada, 1993), 342.
Bibliography
Shield, Carol. The Stone Diaries. Toronto: Random House of Canada, 1993.
The University of Toronto Library has an excellent page that outlines whether and when a book counts as an academic source:
https://onesearch.library.utoronto.ca/faq/does-book-count-academic-source
Books usually count as academic sources, but it depends on what kind of book. Textbooks, encyclopedias, and books published for commercial audiences often do not count as academic.
Consider these questions when you’re deciding if a book is academic or not:
Who is the author? Google him or her. The author should be an expert in the topic of the book with graduate degrees and preferably a current position at a research institution like [a] university.
Where does the information come from? There should be lots of references and other evidence in the book to support the arguments or findings.
Who is the book written for? The book should not be written for laymen.
Who published it? Academic book publishers are often university presses, like Oxford University Press, but you will encounter other academic publishers, like Routledge, Palgrave or the American Psychological Association.
If you’re still not sure, the best thing to do would be to ask your instructor or a librarian for confirmation.
To break it down a bit further:
Academic Monographs
Monograph is a fancy word for, well… book! But it’s a book that, as Google defines, is “a detailed written study of a single specialized subject or an aspect of it.” In Canadian History, historians and students often read monographs rather than more generalist or popular histories. A textbook is usually not a monograph, because it broadly surveys hundreds of different aspects of a large theme (“Canadian History”) rather than a more specialized and narrowly focused history of a specific topic (eg. a history of ironworkers in Halifax in the 1970s). One example of a recent monograph is Caroline Desbiens’ Power from the North (2013). The subtitle of the book is Territory, Identity, and the Culture of Hydroelectricity in Quebec. If you want to learn more about Canadian history, this book might be too narrow. But, while it may seem very niche, it is exactly the kind of book you would want to read if you are doing targeted research on a historical topic such as, say, the role that Hydro-Quebec played in the imaginary of those involved in Quebec’s “Quiet Revolution” in the 1960s, or, perhaps if you are writing a paper on how Cree and Inuit communities in northern Quebec contended with the politics of mega-projects. Frankly, well-written, well-cited, theoretically dense, and cutting-edge monographs about cool topics are what historians are most eager to read. So, a monograph is perfectly acceptable to consult for your research paper.
Anthology
An anthology is a collection of writings by multiple authors. Another word for this is an edited volume. That’s because, instead of having an author or authors like a normal book, the main person or persons behind an anthology is an editor(s). Usually, an anthology in Canadian history revolves around a similar theme. The anthology is rarely cited as a source in and of itself. That’s because the individual chapters themselves are the sources; they are authored separately and about different topics related to the larger theme that binds the anthology together. An example would be Jean Barman’s chapter “Aboriginal Women on the Streets of Victoria,” which is part of a volume edited by Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherdale called Contact Zones. This book features chapters by authors such as Adele Perry, Joan Sangster, and Sarah Carter all revolving around a similar theme–aboriginal women’s experiences of colonialism in Canadian history–but each chapter is, again, a distinct source unto itself.
Citing a chapter from an anthology looks like this:
Footnote
Jean Barman, “Aboriginal Women on the Streets of Victoria: Rethinking Transgressive Sexuality during the Colonial Encounter,” in Contact Zones: Aboriginal & Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past, eds. Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherdale (Vancouver, UBC Press, 2005): 219.
Bibliography
Barman, Jean. “Aboriginal Women on the Streets of Victoria: Rethinking Transgressive Sexuality during the Colonial Encounter.” In Contact Zones: Aboriginal & Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past, 205-227 (eds. Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherdale). Vancouver, UBC Press, 2005.
Biography/Autobiography
A biography is a book about a person’s life authored by someone else, and an autobiography is written by and about oneself. Such sources occupy a strange place in the canon of history with respect to their scholarly nature.
Biographies can be scholarly. But, you will have to check to see what kind of biography it is. Ian Mcdonald’s historical biography of William F. Coaker, “To Each His Own”: William Coaker and the Fishermen’s Protective Union in Newfoundland Politics, 1908-1925 (1987), is a scholarly source; it is based on Mcdonald’s PhD thesis, published in an academic press, and contains a raft of citations. However, many biographies are un-cited so that they can be more accessible to a mass market. Others are historical fiction; think here of Gore Vidal’s Burr (1973).
Autobiographies and memoirs (a historical account or biography written from personal knowledge or special sources), because they are written from the first person perspective, are considered especially subjective. While historians are critical of the notion of “objectivity” in History, it is difficult to assess the academic merits of a book that is essentially one’s analysis of one’s own life. However, attitudes around such texts are changing, and better ones are increasingly being treated as academic sources. An example would be Elsie Paul’s Written as I Remember it: Teachings From the Life of a Sliammon Elder (2015). This source is methodologically innovative, provides invaluable insight into peoples who have historically been underserved by the discipline of History — indigenous people and women specifically — and was born out of collaboration with a Historian, Paige Raibmon.
Textbooks
Textbooks like Conrad, Finkel and Fyson’s History of the Canadian Peoples and J.M. Bumsted’s A History of the Canadian Peoples are expansive histories, and they are written by professional historians. But their purpose is to introduce students to a broad overview of Canadian history. Such texts rarely go into detail about specific topics, and also rarely contain in-text citations (though they will often include a “Further Readings” list at the end of each chapter). While textbooks are great for the limited purpose they serve, the purpose of academic research is to penetrate a topic in greater detail than that which a textbook can provide. So, cite a textbook if you use it, but if the assignment calls for a certain number of academic sources to be used, you should not count a textbook among them the required number of secondary sources.
Encyclopedias and Reference texts
Encyclopedias are extremely popular, and also extremely useful. They are also the source of much unfortunate derision in academic circles, particularly a certain “Free on-line encyclopedia” that everyone uses but is loathe to admit. 🙂
I encourage you to use encyclopedias, including that really famous one you no doubt use to look up celebrities and movies you really like!
However, these are, like textbooks, not scholarly sources. They are meant to provide basic overviews of topics. They are also (ostensibly) objective and neutral. This, frankly, runs counter the spirit of academic writing, which is necessarily argument-based, and is based on buttressing serious, scholarly claims with evidence.
Wikipedia in particular often falls prey to the claim that it is particularly unsuitable because it can be edited by anyone. (This idea that popular knowledge and popular input into what we collectively know about a topic as somehow a bad thing is deeply colonial, undemocratic, and elitist, but moving on…). This, also, by the way is the good thing about Wikipedia. Since it can be edited by anyone, so long as it is constantly reviewed by people who edit it in good faith, it can be kept free of nonsense. This is something that is much more difficult to do with a journal. In 1998, known quack and fraudster Andrew Wakefield published an anti-vaccines tract in the one of the most prestigious journals in the world, The Lancet. In 2010, it was retracted. But, for 12 years, his discredited junk science helped animate an anti-vaccine movement that is causing a resurgence in treatable infectious diseases. By the way, guess where I found that information? Wakefield’s Wikipedia page. This is all common knowledge, and easily Googleable and verifiable. So, whatever you do with a reference text, Wikipedia, or even a journal article, double-, triple- and if you can, quaruple check your facts as much as possible! More to the point, while I am in favour of textbooks and reference texts, they are still not academic sources because they’re not peer-reviewed. (In Wikipedia’s case, it is based on open collaboration, so one might say it is “popularly reviewed” instead of peer reviewed). But, you can usually find excellent academic sources being cited at the bottom of many Wikipedia pages in Notes, References, Further reading, or External links sections that may be even more useful.
“Popular history” texts
The course text in History 102W (SFU) in Summer 2019 is Thomas King’s An Inconvenient Indian (2012). King did an extraordinary amount of research for this book. But, his book is intended for a mass audience. His own claims that he is not writing a conventional “history” notwithstanding, his book contains almost no formal citations, except for an occasional passing reference in the text. Other examples include Jared Diamond’s popular Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997). While that book contains an itemized list of “Further Readings,” it does not contain the rigourous use of in-text citations we might expect in a more academic text, so the ability of readers to independently verify the research is accordingly limited. Popular histories are great to read, but not always academic. Ask your instructor or tutorial leader for permission before you use one.
History Avenue 