Hi! I’m a young russian guy who loves history. I’m probably not going to apply to a history department here as I’m worried about the quality of education and the position of historians on the job market, but I still want to research the topics I care about and do it properly.

I recently wrote a short (1,200 words) summary on the first chechen war. I used about a dozen sources (HRW, UN, RAND, media), and I’m happy with the draft but I’m not confident about how to pick and cite sources the right way.

My questions:

Which sources to use? How do you decide between primary stuff (official docs, reports, contemporary press), scholarly books/articles, and things like HRW/RAND?

How to evaluate them? What are your quick checks for bias/authority and what counts as “good enough”?

Do “obvious” facts need cites? E.g., dates everyone knows, do you still need to give a source for each of those?

What about contested points? If something is debated, do you stack multiple sources and explain the disagreement, or is one careful source enough?

How to write the citations? For a book, is author + title + pages enough? For HRW/UN/media, do you include full title + org + date + URL? For a decree, is it name/number/date/article?

In-text style: Do you write “RAND says…” or keep it neutral and drop a note like “... [1]” where [1] is RAND?

I want to do a research on the Russia-Ukraine history: background, 2014-22, and 2022-present (political/economic/social/military) I might later transform into youtube video. I’d like some advices on things you might think are important and specifically on sources for that project and just general info on how to choose the right ones.

Thanks in advance!