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Encyclopedias aren't exactly considered bastions of authorative knowledge anymore. There are enough university or government run webpages of good repute that books of general knowledge are terribly impractical. But as with any source, it depends on how basic it is and who your audience is. If I'm writing for an archaeological journal, I don't need to cite that the lowland Maya lived in modern Yucatan, Belize, and Guatemala, or that the Classic Maya period was over by 1100 AD. If this is a highschool World History class, I would probably need to. Odds are though, you can find a cursory book on the subject at yor library. That's probably where the encyclopedia got its info. A more specific fact, like the modern population of Mexico, will always need a reference, but you have no reason to use an encyclopedia when the official Mexican government website has the most recent information avaiable with a quick Google search.
If you're explicitly going for the popular narrative of an event, then encyclopedias might come in handy. But again, they are an outdated medium that hardly reflect present knowledge, scholarly or popular. An encyclopedia will always be informayion processed through several levels from its source. Here it might be better to make your point by referencing history as related in an otherwise respectable news article or broadcast, as told on a popular YouTuber's history, as depicted in a feature film/TV show, or even as presented in a top reddit post. These are "primary" sources of popular historical narrative available to anyone with an internet browser. I've often found it useful to use "metadata" as well. Wikipedia only has a paragraph on this entire culture, what does that tell us about heritage awareness? r/AskHistorians has received 30 questions about this topic in the past week, and that tells us what people know/think about it.
TL:DR There's no reason to use a tertiary source encyclopedia when the internet makes primary and secondary resources so available.
Do you mind sharing your topic so we can help you find better sources?
Those are some great ideas I hadn't even considered. I'm in grad school actually, so I was sort of embarrassed to ask, but I really wasn't sure. I'm looking at the Haymarket affair and how particularly one primary source and one secondary source go against the historical consensus, so that's why I'm interested in that 'traditional narrative' idea. I'll take a look at some tellings of the narrative on the web and see if there are some that work. Thanks!
Funny you mention Haymarket -- this came up on the Wikipedia meta thread also on the r/AskHistorians front-page today.
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Undue-Weight-of-Truth-on/130704/
Ha! It's actually Messer-Kruse's (the author of that article) books that I'm looking at for this project.
If you are interested in a traditional narrative in this sense, an encyclopedia could actually work - you'd need to make it clear what your source is, and you would need to make the point that this is the traditional, "popular" view of the incident. In this sort of case, an encyclopedia wouldn't be just OK, it might be one of the best sources you could find.
That makes sense if you're using it to get a sense of popular perceptions of the subject. By comparison, I would not in a million years cite a book published in 1850 or 1901 as an authoritative source on, say, Bronze Age Mesopotamia but it would be an extremely valuable source on the historiography of the topic or what shaped popular 19th century perceptions of the period.
For my BA thesis, I compared encyclopedia definitions over time to assess the field's changing bias on an issue (prayer beads, including but not limited to the rosary). However, this was specifically an area where there were no monographs until 1980's and only a few scattered articles before that. I'd try to find the guy they're lifting up as a straw man, instead. I'd probably end up with something like this: "The traditional view, as represented by Stupidface (1962), holds that 'during the haymarket events....' In the 1980's, however, strong criticism of this understanding emerged (Dumbbutt 1982; Fartbreath 1988). These challenged..." One trick is, if you're not sure who represents a historical consensus in a case like this, check out a specialist encyclopedia--they should have citations/further reading that will tell you who they think are the basic people in the field. But you don't have to cite the encyclopedia, you should probably cite the people they're citing.
In the Haymarket case, unless there's a particularly notable essay in a specialist encyclopedia or you're arguing about "popular understanding" rather than "scholarly consensus", I'd stick to books and articles.
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There are some that are outstandingly good, however. The Encyclopedia of Religion (the one that was first edited by Mircea Eliade) still has, for example, the best source on why the concept of "dying and rising gods" is total bunk (it's an entry by J. Z. Smith, who is maybe the most important person to religious studies as a field since Eliade). I actually wrote my BA thesis comparing how different specialist encyclopedias dealt with the same topic to get a sense of how the field had moved, so I read a ton of them and some of them are, like, mind-glowingly good (though obviously now much of the information is outdated). But seriously, if I reach an obscure classical Christian heresy or a minor medieval Rabbi and just want to know their basic outlines, the (freely available online) [Old] Catholic Encyclopedia of 1907-1912 and the Jewish Encyclopedia 1901-7 are these unbelievable works. Like I honestly cannot believe how they organized it all, without computers or email even! Just these monuments of erudition.
To be totally honest, the decline of specialist encyclopedias in the internet era is tremendously sad. A few have thrived (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, I have you in mind here, buddy), but for the most part as publishing becomes much much cheaper, you see many many more. Honestly, though, they don't need to be crap--the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is all freely accessible online, all peer-reviewed, and was only started in 1995! (wow, okay, that's twenty years ago, but what I mean is that it was "born digital")
The simple answer is no. If you are in high school/secondary education, your instructor may allow it, but anything at the college/university level should not allow it and probably doesn't. If it is truly a basic fact such as Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941, you don't need a citation for that event. If you are discussing the American entry into the war, then depending on the detail and the relevance to your appear, you should probably have a basic source for this. If you don't have your hands on a published overview history of the war - or whatever it takes - then find a website that will work. Do not use wiki, but look for a university website that provides the history you need and seems reputable.
I hope that helps - good luck.
Thanks. That's what I assumed, but I just haven't really thought about it before. Thanks for the reply!
But see my different response below once you revealed how you were going to use an encyclopedia: that would be appropriate.
Wiki CAN be a good place to find sources, as long as you don't trust the citation - you have to look it up and read it yourself. Its not uncommon for the source to be misrepresented or occasionally entirely fictional. Even things like direct quotes need greater context.
You are correct; any encyclopedia can be used for sources and wiki can offer a great deal. Like any source, source criticism is needed, and an encyclopedia requires the highest level of source criticism because of its nature, but that doesn't mean it cannot be useful. Citing it is a bad idea except in the rare case where the general context is being sought, where, for example, the author wants to demonstrate how something is popularly perceived. Using an article as a straw man is perfectly acceptable as long as it is clear how it is being used.
What about encyclopedia britannica online? I've cited that in my BA in history from Kings College London and not been criticized for it. I used it mainly for facts that were slightly to obscure to be uncited, but not worth finding a book or journal article for...
I would not allow it in my classes, but one can expect different standards at different places. Britannica is a time-honored institution, but I have been shocked by the number I have things I have found there that are simply wrong - not outdated, but wrong in any decade. I would avoid citing it like I would all other encyclopedias.
I've used encyclopedias and wikipedia to cite common perceptions and haven't been criticized for it unless I was not clear about what I was doing. It's rare that this comes up but in particular I remember writing a paper about burial practices that was supposed to compare ancient and modern practices. No one seemed to mind using an encyclopedia for evidence of modern practices.
Maybe my prof just let me off easy?
An author could not do this in a publication; a university education should be preparing students for that level of productivity even if most don't attain that professional level of writing. But then, I am from a previous century, so perhaps it's just me.
They're not talking about citing an encyclopedia for the facts contained in that encyclopedia. They're talking about citing the encyclopedia as a sort of meta-reference: something along the lines of, say, citing an encyclopedia's article from the 1950s on the topic of Communism to demonstrate what the common perception in the 1950s of Communism was. When cited in that sense, an encyclopedia is no longer a tertiary source, but a primary source, as you aren't citing the information itself but rather the narrative in which it's presented. Akin to citing Herodotus to demonstrate what the view of history at the time was vs. citing Herodotus unchallenged to say what actually happened.
Citing an encyclopedia is normally bad because it's a tertiary source, but in a circumstance such as this where the encyclopedia becomes a primary source, it becomes valid because the objection no longer applies.
I agree that this is what the OP revealed. And re-reading u/LegalAction - I see that he, too, is heading in that direction. In that case, an encyclopedia can be an excellent source - but it is a rare situation where one can say that.
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I think you're misunderstanding what LegalAction is talking about. They're not talking about citing a present-day encyclopedia as a tertiary source, as in just using it as a source of information. They're talking about citing an encyclopedia of some time period as a primary source, as in to show, by virtue of what the encyclopedia says, what people believed at the time. In that case, the reliability or unreliability of the content becomes irrelevant, because you aren't talking about the content itself, but rather what the encyclopedia presents as a narrative. And if the content is inaccurate to the truth of the matter, then that's a part of the reference as well: showing this inaccuracy and drawing conclusions based on the existence of that inaccuracy in a reference book of the time.
Re-reading your comment, I see that you were using encyclopedias to arrive at common perceptions - and that would indeed be a good source to gain insight to that part of a topic.
While encyclopedias are typically not good sources themselves, they are an excellent tool for finding sources. Most encyclopedias will list where their information is from, and they tend to use reputable sources themselves.
This isn't just encyclopedias either. Anytime you want a source, but the text you are reading isn't reputable or seems too far removed to cite, try reading that sources sources!