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Primary and Secondary Sources in the Sciences

Learn to recognize and identify research and review articles in the sciences

What are Primary Sources?

Do you panic if your professor tells you to find a review article? Can you tell by looking at an article if it is an original research report? This guide will clarify what's what in scientific literature and give you some examples to look at.

Definitions

Definitions

In the scientific and medical disciplines, the terms "primary source" and "secondary source" have a specific meaning.

Primary sources are research studies of some kind; they can be quantitative or qualitative and are generally written by the person or people who conducted a study or experiment.

Secondary sources are one step removed from the primary source.  They are reviews or analyses, usually of multiple primary sources, written by someone who did not actually conduct the study.

  Primary Source Secondary Source
May also be called: Research Article, Original Research, Clinical Trial, Randomized Controlled Trial, Study Review, Review Article, Systematic Review, Meta-Analysis

What is it?

 Research performed by scientists and scholars is documented in articles they write and present at meetings or conferences and are published in scholarly journals. An article that examines the current state of research in a given field. Review articles do not report new data or findings. Instead, they perform a comprehensive survey of existing research, bringing together studies that cover related areas.
Key characteristics:
  • often have three or more authors
  • state the purpose of the study in the abstract
  • should include a methods (or methods and materials) section
  • contribute new knowledge for the scientific community
  • often have only one or two authors
  • state the purpose of the review in the abstract
  • act as a starting point to learn about a new field
What's usually included in the article?
  • an abstract (brief summary) of their article
  • an introduction to explain their hypothesis or objective
  • a brief literature review of published research relevant to this study
  • methods and materials used to carry out their research
  • extensive discussion of their findings and results, generally illustrated with charts, graphs, tables, and diagrams
  • a conclusion based on the results of their findings
  • references to outside works cited in this report
  • an abstract
  • an introduction, sometimes formatted as a Table of Contents
  • multiple discussion sections divided by specific sub-topics that have been studied
  • a conclusion that often points to potential future research areas
  • an extensive list of references containing all the research studies that have been discussed
The title is ... Very specific and sometimes states a position More general
Are methods, results, tables, and figures included? Yes. They should include or describe firsthand data collected by the authors. Sometimes. Methods and results describe their research process; tables may include lists of suggested articles.
Examples Research articles, dissertations, technical reports, conference proceedings Review articles, commentaries, editorials; sometimes newspaper articles, books, textbooks

 

Adapted from San Jose State University, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library. (2018, May 5). Communicative disorders and sciences: Primary vs. secondary sources.