Intermediate Year Secondary Literature Quiz

This quiz is designed to reiterate some of the key points about selecting and using high-quality secondary literature in your essays. These skills will help you build your essays on firm foundations by making sure you are engaging with the most valuable materials. You are also welcome, and indeed encouraged, to take the previous year quiz if you would like a refresher, and you can take the quiz as many times as you like!

1. What are we looking for in high-quality secondary literature? (select all that apply)

Written by experts.

Peer-reviewed.

Follows academic conventions and cites its sources appropriately.

Aimed at a scholarly audience.

Engages deeply with the research – it’s more than a summary.

An entertaining writing style.

2. What does it mean when we say something has been peer-reviewed?

That Lords of the realm have read and approved it for publication.

That two or more experts in the field have read and reviewed the work, assessing its quality before publication.

That the work has been examined by an exam board and passed.

That the whole history department has reviewed the article after it was published.

3. How do we identify whether an article has been peer-reviewed?

The library has a helpful tag indicating that an article has been peer-reviewed.

A quick google search will tell us, for sure!

The Journal’s “About Us” pages either say it is peer-reviewed or indicate the Editors and Editorial Board. These editors should be established scholars published in the field, and not students.

Each article will have a disclaimer in the header or footer of the page, telling us if it has been peer-reviewed and by whom – these will be established scholars.

4. Which of the following should you generally avoid citing as a secondary source, unless instructed to do so by your seminar tutor/module convenor? (select all that apply)

Website for an institution e.g. UK Parliament online

Chapter in an edited volume

Lectures

Peer-reviewed articles

Podcasts

Scholarly monographs

Blog posts

5. How might you improve the following bibliography for the following 1,500-word essay: “Were early modern rebellions in Europe essentially conservative?” (Select all that apply.)

Dodds, Madeleine Hope, The Pilgrimage of Grace, 1536-1537 and the Exeter conspiracy, 1538 (Cambridge, 1915).

Elton, G. R., ‘Presidential Address: Tudor Government. The Points of Contact: III. The Court’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Series 26 (1976), 211–28.

Thompson, E. P., ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past & Present, 50 (1971), pp. 76-136.

Focus on just one century, or one rebellion.

Include some more recent scholarship.

Replace these suggestions with peer-reviewed scholarship.

Find more scholarship on other areas of Europe, so it’s not all about England.

Identify more readings – this is not enough.

6. Tertiary sources (e.g. Encyclopaedias, Wikipedia, Indexes,) often do not provide enough depth, or expert knowledge, to explore a topic in detail. So how might they be helpful in our research?

They can provide evidence for the definitions of basic concepts such as “capitalism”.

They can help us identify important scholarship on the topic via their footnotes or bibliography, which we can then find in the library.

They can evidence that an event happened or an organisation existed, e.g. “The East India Company”.

7. What weaknesses do blog posts, magazine articles, and YouTube videos, have as secondary literature for an academic essay, even if they are produced by historians, with a list of sources? (Select all relevant)

They are biased, therefore their content will only give a one-sided account of the topic under discussion.

They are produced as educational entertainment, so they engage less directly with the scholarship and/or primary sources.

The topics have to be trendy, so they will not cover boring material.

They are not double checked by other experts (peer-reviewed), so they are more likely to reproduce errors.

They are full of grammatical errors, which means their arguments cannot be trusted.

8. What are some reliable ways we can use to identify the scholars which our secondary literature is responding to? (Select all relevant)

Take note of which historians they mention by name, and in what context.

Ask ChatGPT which scholars the author was engaging with.

Look for an encyclopaedia entry which tells you all about this particular author.

Check the footnotes when they make a claim or critique ones made by previous scholars – which scholars are they citing?

9. Which of the following would be the best quality to use as secondary literature in an academic essay on the impact of war on Nursing c.1900-1950? (Select two.)

‘Edith Cavell’, Florence Nightingale Museum < https://www.florence-nightingale.co.uk/edith-cavell/ > [Accessed 11/11/2025]

‘nursing: medical profession’, Encyclopaedia Britannica < https://www.britannica.com/science/nursing > [Accessed 11/11/2025]

Jane Brooks & Christine E. Hallett (eds.), One hundred years of wartime nursing practices, 1854-1953 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015).

‘World War One: The many battles faced by WW1’s nurses’, BBC News Online, 2 April 2014 < https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26838077 > [Accessed 11/11/2025]

Vari Drennan, ‘Remembering nurses awarded the Royal Red Cross in World War Two for exceptional devotion and bravery’, Royal College of Nursing Blog, 10 Nov 2025 < https://www.rcn.org.uk/news-and-events/Blogs/remembering-nurses-awarded-the-royal-red-cross-in-world-war-two-for-exceptional-devotion-and-bravery > [Accessed 11/11/2025]

Minna Elomaa-Krapu, Marja Kaunonen and Paivi Astedt-Kurki, ‘Volunteer experiences of wartime nursing in Finland during World War II’, Nursing Enquiry, 27: 2 (2020), pp. 1-11.

10. Should we use a BA or MA thesis which has been published online in our essays?

Yes. If they are using peer-reviewed literature and citing their sources, it’s trustworthy.

No. We have no idea whether the thesis passed, and at what grade, it is likely to be full of errors.

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(Twelve Articles of the Peasants pamphlet of 1525, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

(Edith Cavell, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

(UK government, OGL 3 <http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3>, via Wikimedia Commons)

(E. P. Thompson at a protest., 1980, Kim Traynor, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Department of History

Intermediate Year Secondary Literature Quiz

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