Primary vs. Secondary Literature
Primary literature reports original findings. Secondary literature uses, reports, or builds on primary literature. Secondary sources contain useful material that you can use as background information when you are learning about a topic.
As you find sources for your research projects, you must learn to distinguish between these two types of sources. You can start by determining whether the sources are scholarly or popular sources and choosing the types of scientific articles that will be most useful for your purpose. Some library databases will identify material from both popular and scholarly journals, so it is very important to know the difference.
Articles found in Internet search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, should also be evaluated for quality and reliability. This extra step is generally not necessary for articles found in library databases, as they have already gone through an editorial or peer-review process.
Primary Literature Sources
- Are written by professors or researchers (look for a university or laboratory affiliation in the article)
- Have abstracts and reference lists
- Have a specialized format (often consisting of an introduction, methodology, results, discussion, and conclusions)
- Use discipline-specific language
Example: Scientific research articles– view an example research article on honeybees
NOTE: some review articles may be considered a primary source if they include findings from original research.
Secondary Literature Sources
- Are written by journalists
- Rarely have abstracts and reference lists
- Don’t follow a specialized format
- Use language understandable by the general public
Examples: popular science magazine articles, books (except those that are a compilation of original research articles, which can be used as primary literature), book chapters, book reviews, annotated bibliographies, reports, newspaper articles, websites and other non-scholarly works online, summaries, editorials, encyclopedias, dictionaries.
NOTE: there is another category of literature called, “tertiary” sources, and categorizing material as “secondary” or “tertiary” sources is sometimes subjective and relative to context.