Secondary can be informative.
But at the point where your sources only cite secondary sources, that's sort of the definition of "meta."
And when your sources cite tertiary sources, all hell breaks loose.
My Pushkin prof made this clear. You cite a source citing Salon citing Politico citing the OMB, publicly available, it's a crime to not look at the OMB report. (Although, you know, more than once I've gotten a post removed for simply citing the OMB or an FBI report that didn't support the Gruppendenken.)
Had a peer (not friend, more than acquaintance) who looked into an equation widely used in speech acoustics. (Hey, I still have your rolling pin and fake parakeet, if you're here, neo-Canuck.) He's now tenured.
Anyway, he bothered to trace this equation back. Everybody cited the original source, so he looked at the original source. He realized the original equation was *not* what he, at UCLA grad school, was taught. Compared it with data. The source was correct. And he followed the equation through time and an early text, now old but authoritative, botched it. They misquoted it, but still claimed to be accurately citing the original. They screwed it up, and trusted their secondary, tertiary, quaternary sources. So *every* text and publication for the previous 50 years cited the botch--which was *close*, but not as good as the original data-based equation. Which was amusing when people said, "It's not this accurate, perhaps *this* is better." And a publication citing the original got credit for *almost* fixing the originally miscited equation. By now I'm sure a PhD has been given for restating something cited in diss'sb references.
The reviews he got back from his submission to a journal said, basically, "How could so many esteemed and valued researchers get it wrong?" To which he responded with data, graphs of said data and, crucially, PDFs of the original. Because those "esteemed and valued researchers," um, got it wrong.
Primary sources rule.
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