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Research Tutorial

Primary vs. Secondary Research

Now let's focus on scholarly articles. Scholarly articles are written by researchers or experts in a particular field and contribute new knowledge or insights on a topic. These new insights are either based on primary or secondary research.

Primary and secondary research articles both have value, but it's important to understand the difference.

  • Primary Research = Researchers conduct their own experiments or observational studies and write sources to report on the subsequent data, methodology, and conclusions. Primary sources are therefore based on original data. 
  • Secondary Research = Authors synthesize, interpret, or review information from primary sources. Secondary sources do not contribute original data, but often provide an overview or analysis of a topic. Sometimes secondary sources use raw data from primary studies to interpret new conclusions, but they do not conduct their own studies or provide their own data. Examples include literature reviews, meta-analyses, or review articles. 

Primary research is often considered of higher value than secondary research because it provides original and unique data. That being said, which source type you choose will depend on your assignment requirements and information required to answer your research question. 

How can you tell? 

Read the abstract of the article. Does the author describe how the research was performed? Look for key words that help indicate if it is a primary or secondary source: 

  • Primary Source - look for words like survey, interview, clinical trial.
  • Secondary Source - look for words like literature review, systematic review, summary.

Let's look at an example..

Researcher A conducts a study interviewing 40 police officers about their experience with post-traumatic stress disorder. Researcher A publishes a journal article based on their study, which is a primary source because it uses original data from their own study.

 

Researcher Y is writing an article on post-traumatic stress disorder amongst police officers and they read Researcher A's journal article. They use Researcher A's findings and theories to support their argument. Researcher Y's article is a secondary source because it did not use original data, but relied on another author's data and findings. 

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Unless otherwise noted, this guide is licensed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License).