Questions?  Need help?   wiswellj@appstate.edu.  Email me, or we can meet in person, Levine or main campus, or in Zoom, if needed. 

Also, consider using our chat service for quick questions.  (You can also find the chat button on left edge of main library page or through the floating Need help? button on right.).  I'm available there a lot.  -- John Wiswell

We still have a limit of 5 simultaneous users for each of these manuals.  Please close them when you're not actively using them.  --JW

Most of the peer-reviewed articles you'll find using PubMed, Google Scholar, ScienceDirect, APPsearch, CINAHL, and other search interfaces will be original or primary research.  Not all.  You'll often see reviews, systematic reviews, and meta-analyses (and maybe evidence summaries, guidelines, or position statements).  You might also see editorials, commentary, news.    All these are not considered original or primary.

Look for the standard format: short introduction, methods, results, and conclusions.  If your article is in this format, it's not editorials, commentary, news.  It's probably original research.  But,

Look for terms like these, especially in the title or abstract: review, systematic review, meta-analysis, evidence summary, guideline, or position statement.  If you don't see those, it's almost certainly original research.

Look for the standardized format, especially whether there is a Methods or Methodology section.  Then look for the terms like review.  If you see a methods section and you cannot see the article described as a review (or similar), it's probably original.

This is a very simplified approach, so please fell free to ask me to look at any articles with you.  John Wiswell, wiswellj@appstate.edu .

More details, if you need them

One additional area of confusion is this.  Some original research articles use data collected systematically by governments and other entities.  Other original research articles are based on original data, data that's not collected or measured or described elsewhere.  But original research does not have to have to start with original data.

Note that in some journals like the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, original research is labelled "Original Research."  (This journal has an unusually high proportion of articles that are not original, but they're pretty well labelled.)

Original research where researchers collect or create their own data

One detail -- 3 peer-reviewed articles, must be the original studies, not review papers

See box below titled, "Recognizing original research articles."

Also, (video) how to filter for original articles in ScienceDirect, Web of Science, and PubMed.  You cannot really filter with a button in APPsearch or Google Scholar.  But you should be beginning to recognize the original versus review anyway. (Note: I claim in this video that I eliminated everything but original studies from my PubMed results, but that's not true.  I filtered out only reviews, including systematic reviews and meta-analyses.  There would still be editorials and a small variety of other things.)