Title: Identifying primary and secondary sources in the sciences. What is a Primary Source? A primary source is original research conducted by a scientist. Some examples are lab notebooks, lab reports and scholarly research articles. What is a Secondary Source? A secondary source seeks out primary sources, analyzes or reviews them and creates a response to them. Some examples of secondary sources are magazine or news articles, scholarly review articles, encyclopedias, and textbooks. Another way of thinking about it is if you do an experiment in your class, you write down your results and you write a research article on your experiment. These are all primary sources. As a result of your published articles, a science journalist reads your article and references it in his article in National Geographic. Or, a publisher decides to add information about your article in a new biology textbook. These are secondary sources. When it gets complicated: Most of the scholarly research articles that you find in journals are either original research (aka primary sources) or review articles (aka secondary sources). It can be tricky to tell them apart. Here are some similarities between original research articles and review articles. The authors are experts in the field, Academic journals publish them, typically includes the following sections: Abstract, introduction, and a reference list. Original research articles and review articles are geared towards other scientists and college students and they are very technical or advanced in their topic or study. How to tell the difference: An original research article or Primary source article has the following characteristics. These articles cover one study or experiment that was completed by the authors, the title or topic will be very specific, they always include a methodology and results section. The methodology section explains how the experiment was setup. The results section includes data or results from the experiment. Review articles or secondary source articles analyze or compare multiple original research articles on a topic. You can think of review articles as a giant literature review. The article gives an overview of a specific topic or technique. These articles may have the term “review” in the journal or article title. The authors of the article did not do a study or experiment. Finally, the article usually has subheadings related to the topic throughout the article. If you have more questions, please ask us at the Research and Instructional Services Desk at askref@ecu.edu or at 252-328-6677.