One of the weirdest referee reports I've ever received was by a philosopher who was very upset with me for citing handbook chapters rather than original texts (some of which were from the 1980s, others published in obscure edited volumes). There is so much wrong with this attitude.
First, it's territorial. "Insider" scholars who have read all these obscure texts that are hard and expensive to get your hands on reject papers by "outsider" scholars who only have access to handbooks. This is gross and it's also bad for progress because insiders aren't so much refuting ideas as refuting the minutiae of how those ideas are presented. This lends itself to insularity and scholarly stagnation.
Second, it makes the field look bad. Handbooks are meant to be a summary of where a field is at. If a field cannot be understood from its handbooks but only by reading various obscure texts, then that field is not unified nor easily understood. My case was particularly bizarre because the handbook chapters I was referring to were on very well-established notions like 'perfectionism' and 'objective-list theories of well-being'.
Third, and relatedly to 1 and 2, handbooks are the most straightforward way for scholars from other fields and especially disciplines to get across another field. If we are discouraged from citing handbooks then interdisciplinarity is dead in the water. By way of example, I write a lot about how theories from the psychology of self can inform philosophical theories of the self and related issues like motivation, practical reasoning, well-being, and self-actualisation. I don't have a degree in psychology. Rather, I thought to myself a few years ago "you know, psychologists have probably done a lot of work on these themes, let's have a look at what they've written". You could go to Psychnet and be flooded with content from a search for "self". So instead I went to book depository and searched for "psychology self" and out popped "The Handbook of Self and Identity". Delightful. Following a few leads from there I found the "Handbook of Experimental Existential Psychology" and the "Handbook of Positive Psychology". I noticed that the handbooks shared many authors, which helped me zero in on particular areas of psychology and particular scholars who were relevant to my interests. Now I like to think my papers are "psychologically informed". I've noticed that psychologists are really stoked to see their worked being used in other fields and write encouraging notes to me pointing out corrections and refinements. Philosophers, on the other hand, write scathing reports of how I've missed 'a critical nuance' or some such territorial nonsense.
So anyway, handbooks are great and everyone should read, use, and cite them.
Nice read
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