Citing lecture notes

Question

I am writing my thesis and using notes from different lectures on the topic as a source of sources. These notes cite other papers and present briefly the ideas, and I do use the lecture notes to find interesting papers on the topic, and in order to add some formal thinking to my research, but never actually quote a part of the lecture notes nor do I take any ideas directly from the notes but rather from the cited papers. I just use the general structure as a "guard" for my own structure and a source of good papers.

Is there a way to cite these? It seems to me that it wouldn't be quite honest to not cite these lecture notes as they helped me a lot.

Idea: should I mention these maybe in the acknowledgement part? Or at the very end of the thesis, between conclusion and bibliography?

Answer 1

Since you don't have a bunch of "sources of sources" -- just this one -- you have three easy ways to remain honest and give due credit.

1. Find a way to cite the notes directly as a reference, preferably before you cite anything you were led to by the notes. Directly quoting something is not a prerequisite for citing it as a reference.
2. As you suggested, put a sentence in the acknowledgements section. Something like: The lecture notes from Dr. Smith's course, "Alien Spaceships," were used to provide overall direction and as a source of references.
3. Do both, just to be clear.

Answer 2

My suggestion is to divide your bibliography in two sections: the first section can be titled, for example, Cited works (or something similar); the second one can be titled Further references.

At the beginning of the Further references section you should add a brief text explaining which kind of references you have included in this section and why.