A few words about primary, peer-reviewed resources and the science research paper
Your research papers will mostly consist of citable primary information—evidence-based literature of new, original, first-hand findings based on the scientific method of empirical research producing provable, repeatable, verifiable data and conclusions.
Let’s say I perform a scientific experiment, then tell a friend about it. If you want to get good information about that experiment, do you ask me or my friend about it? You ask me, because my friend is a second-hand, secondary source of the information. Something will get lost in the translation, as they say. You want to get it “from the horse’s mouth,” from the original source.
Now let’s say I submit the findings of the experiment to a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. A group of experts, or referees, in the field will either accept or reject my article, based on a set of standards in place. By being accepted for publication by this process my work will have a higher level of credibility and authority.
The same academic credibility and authority is not held by popular magazines such as Good Housekeeping or Ladies Home Journal (which is not an academic journal).
Now is it possible that my experiment had errors, or even fraudulent information? Yes. It’s possible that even faulty or dishonest research gets accepted by peer-review. It may actually happen more often than we realize.
There are certain buzzwords, or key criteria, that clue you in that the article you are looking at is a primary source: the words study, data , hypothesis, findings, case study, clinical trial, empirical observation, (controlled) experiment, conclusion. A primary source article will be typically organized in sections that have an introduction, explanation of methodology, tables of data, discussion of findings, conclusion, references. (Scholarly, journals may also contain news, book reviews, letters to the editor and such, but these are not primary research.) (See also here.)
Scholarly information is not always primary source material.
Secondary information is also scholarly (written by academically credentialed experts, published in peer-reviewed journals, with footnotes and citations) but it is second-hand information: explanations, summaries, interpretation, essays, commentaries of empirical studies. Scholarly literature reviews, theoretical and speculative discussions, textbooks are all examples of secondary, not primary information. Secondary information has its important place and usefulness in your research paper by providing background information, explications (explanations), perspectives, trends about a particular topic that will help you understand and select a topic, providing a direction for your research paper.
