A Guide to Primary Scientific Articles

A primary scientific article is a report on the results of an experiment by the person or group who performed it. Primary scientific articles usually contain high-level vocabulary and original data, often presented in tables and charts.

Typically, a primary scientific article has the following sections:

Articles with those components indicate that the author is presenting original research or data. Sometimes scholarly journals or databases also include review articles, which summarize published research on a topic but do not contain new results from original research. Even though these sources are scholarly, they are NOT primary articles.