Sciences Learning Communties: Finding Research Articles

For your presentation you have to find several articles on your topic and they all have to be primary sources.  What does that mean, exactly?

"Primary source" means something different in history or literature than it does in the sciences.  In science, a primary source is:

• original research; the authors proposed a hypothesis and then proved or disproved it with their chosen method.  The article reports the results of this experiment or study.
• reporting results that have not been filtered by someone else.  This isn't someone talking about what some other scientist did.  This is the experimenters themselves talking about what they themselves did.
• published as an article, dissertation, or conference paper (among others).  A primary source would not be a review article, magazine article, or a book.
• when published as an article, it's published in a peer-reviewed journal.

An article which is a primary source will usually feature the following:

• introduction or background- this usually features a statement of the problem and a review of earlier research
• method - a description of the experiment and how data was interpreted
• results - what actually happened when they did the experiment
• discussion - Was the hypothesis proven or disproven?  What are some avenues for further research?

Here is a video about peer review. Throughout this video, you’ll learn what peer review is and why it’s important, how the peer review process works, and how to locate peer-reviewed articles.