Advanced Herbal Course Referencing Guidance

As you begin to conduct research for the Advanced Herbal Course, you may be wondering where to find high quality, reliable information. Doing an Internet search on your topic can be counterproductive because the information you often find that way is vague and may not be of good quality. 

While internet sources like LiveStrong, Wikipedia, and un-referenced blog articles are not always trustworthy, there are plenty of credible, reliable resources to use if you know where to find them. To do good research, you will want to look for resources like first hand accounts and scientific studies. These are types of references that are known as primary and secondary sources.

Primary Sources

Primary sources are those that provide first-hand testimony or direct evidence concerning a topic under investigation. Primary sources in herbalism are created by witnesses or recorders who experience the events or conditions being documented. Historical documents like books, diaries, manuscripts, and letters are examples of primary sources when they are written by an author with first-hand experience of the topic. 

Herbalism is also a dynamic practice, not a static one, and so new information is still currently being published. This means that primary sources do not necessarily need to be historical. Modern books or articles written by a contemporary author knowledgeable with the subject material and adding first-hand experience with the topic are primary sources, and journal articles reporting new scientific studies or research findings are also primary sources. 

Some examples of primary sources:

• The Eclectic Practice of Medicine with Special Reference to the Treatment of Disease, 1910, Finley Ellingwood
• King’s American Dispensatory, 1898, Henry Wickes Felter and John Uri Lloyd
• A journal article reporting NEW research or findings 
• Taylor, L. A., (1980). Plants Used as Curatives by Certain Southeastern Tribes. Cambridge, MA: Botanical Museum of Harvard University.  A publication presenting ethnobotanical findings from original field research.
• The Practice of Traditional Western Herbalism, 2004, Matthew Wood. (This publication would be considered primary in some aspects and secondary in others. Wood brings together various primary sources to create new information. However, many of his opinions are based off of historical texts.)

When evaluating scientific research articles, you’ll want to refer back to Unit 2, Lesson 5: How to Evaluate Research to determine the quality of the research and the study conclusions.

Secondary Sources

Secondary sources are those that analyze or interpret primary sources. These sources are one or more steps removed from the original text. Secondary sources are not necessarily contemporary, but can also be historical. Databases, review articles, and textbooks fall into this category. Books can also be secondary sources. The Advanced Herbal Course is another secondary source. 

Some examples of secondary sources:

• The Practice of Traditional Western Herbalism, 2004, Matthew Wood. (As mentioned above, this book can be considered both a primary source and a secondary source. In the instance of a secondary source, Wood presents overviews of philosophies from Ayurveda, TCM, and Physiomedicalist/Eclectic literature. These original ideas are not his ideas, and therefore he is a secondary source for these).
• The Encyclopedia of Medicinal Plants, 2001, Andrew Chevallier (This is a compilation of information derived from primary sources, there are not new or novel ideas specifically from the author presented in this publication).
• Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, Daniel E. Moermann (this is a compilation of information from original ethnographic research that he pulled together from various journals and publications. He references his primary sources throughout the text).

Tertiary Sources

There are also tertiary sources, which distill the information even further into an easy to use format like an almanac or an encyclopedia. To make sure your information is as reliable and detailed as possible, try to use primary and secondary sources whenever you can.

Keep in mind that blogs and websites don’t always reference their sources and their authors may not double check their facts before posting. This means they may not be a source of reliable, correct information. It’s best to use these with caution. Unless quality references are provided, it may better to consider these sources to be opinion rather than fact.

Resources

Below are some resources to get you started.

• 101 Herbal Books for Your Library – Herbal Academy’s list of some of our favorite herbal books
• PubMed – a searchable database of published research articles
• Google Scholar – a searchable database of published research articles
• Sherman Cohn Library at Maryland University Integrative Health – extensive resources organized in a clickable tag cloud format
• High quality online websites and articles of reputable herbalists (such as Matthew Wood, Michael Moore, Ryan Drum, Kiva Rose, and jim mcdonald, to name a few)

Online resources for discovering historical herbal documents:

• National Library of Medicine Digital Collections
• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Henriette’s Herbal Homepage
• Southwest School of Botanical Medicine Archives

Compiling and Organizing References

As you do your research, keep good notes on the sources from which you are obtaining information so that you can properly cite the source. Basically, any statement that is not common knowledge or that you rely on other sources to develop should be attributed to the author with a citation in the text and a reference in the bibliography. This not only gives credit where it is due, but also substantiates the information you are presenting, thus supporting your ideas/writing. For an example of thorough referencing, refer to any of the lessons in this course. 

It can help to choose a consistent formatting style for your bibliography from the get-go. The Purdue Online Writing Lab is a great resource for learning how to format references and citations in the American Psychological Association (APA) style commonly used in social sciences. This short video gives a quick tutorial of how to reference books and journal articles, how to cite information within an essay/paper, and how to synthesize information and ideas from other sources into your own writing while giving appropriate credit to the original source. For examples of in-text citations and reference lists, see any of the Advanced Herbal Course lessons.