Often when doing a research assignment, you are required to use only primary or secondary sources. What is the difference between them?

Primary sources in science are based on first-hand observation, experimentation, or modeling and report new research or findings. Examples of primary sources are:

• a journal article reporting new findings from a laboratory
• a report on new findings from a wildlife management study
• the handwritten instructions for how to do a new lab procedure

Secondary sources analyze and interpret primary sources. These are examples in science:

• an article reviewing the last 10 years of published research about penguins (often called a review article or literature review)
• a book about the discovery of DNA structure
• a movie about the life of Charles Darwin

When searching for articles, you can find a primary source by adding [study] to your search terms and can find a secondary source by adding [review] to your search terms. These terms appear in the abstracts of the journal articles.