Apologies for the dumb question. I'm interested in a specific subject which partially deals with actual history and was looking into writing a book on it in my spare time. The only real experience I have with doing research is for writing papers during my undergrad, so very limited in scope with a clear thesis I was trying to prove, and very limited in how long it could be.
How do you know if your source is subpar or generally thought of as bad in history circles (if you haven't been in history circles in a decade)? How do you find research to ensure you look at all sides of an event, every view point so I avoid just reinforcing what I already believe going in? How do you find more specific information on a broader topic?
Again, apologies for the dumb questions. Thanks!
A first and crucial bit of advise I'd give you as a historian as well as someone who recently published their first (non-academic, popular oriented history) book: All good writing on a historical topic and all research on said topic is driven by a specific question. You need a question to structure your material. If you, say, want to research the US Civil War, if you just go about it generally looking into its history, you'll soon drown in material. If you on the other, say, follow the question of "What impact did the Civil War have on the social structure of the Applachians?" you'll be able to much better narrow down a.) what you have to research and b.) what sources are useful to you.
This is the really crucial first step in assessing historical primary sources. Because however "good" they turn out to be, the first step is always, always, always to ask yourself "Is this stuff actually useful to answer my question?" because if it isn't – if it deals using the above example with the relation of the CSA with the Dutch government at the time – you don't have to worry about it.
Secondly, after you have your question, you need to decide on a method or a broad approach to answer it. What I mean by that is that you need to decide if you want to focus on political decision solely, or a history from below, or a history of ideas among intellectuals, or a history from an economic perspective and so on and so forth. Often this approach will be contained in the question – a history of how the Civil War affected the social structure of the Appalachians makes little sense when approached from the angle of international diplomacy e.g. – but you need to be aware of how you want to approach you question in order to further narrow down the source material and assess the source material you come across. Somebody writing a history from below will find immense use in diaries while somebody focusing on economic policy might have less use for it.
This – your question and your approach – will give you both a structure to assess your sources as well as determine for you which angles and viewpoints you'll have to look at a certain event. Capturing all viewpoints on a specific event, especially if it is something than spans a longer time frame or involves many different facets of society is very hard ti impossible unless you make that event and that event solely the focus of your question.
What your question will also do is to narrow down what kind of secondary literature you'll have to read and you'll have to read a lot. Because nobody who starts to research a historic topic starts altogether from scratch and the work of others, whether in relevant books or articles, can save you a lot of time in terms of finding sources, assessing sources, and gaining a general insight into what the current academic consensus on a topic is.Secondary literature will give you an impression in which archives you need to go, which accounts of historical persons are interesting for your question and what other primary sources (contemporary newspapers etc) you need to consider. It will also give you invaluable information for later assessing these sources, e.g. knowing that the NYT was considered anti-isolationist in WWI is crucial information when using their articles from that time.
Once you have your primary sources, there also is of course, the basic work of source criticism. Source criticism at its very basis historical thinking along the "five Cs" and assessing sources along the lines of the "W-questions".
The five Cs – more info here at the American Historical Association on thinking historically – are Change over Time, Context, Causality, Contingency, and Complexity. If you are unsure what that means, really check out the AHA article since they explain it in depth there.
The W-Questions are: Who? When? What? Where? Why? What for? and the great outlying How? That means that in case of every source, you should ask yourself Who wrote it when, where, what for and why and how did they do it? When answering all these questions you should arrive at a conclusion about how useful a source is and how reliable it is in context.
This is my first advice but if you have more questions, please don't hesitate and good luck.