Primary Sources in psychology are:
- written accounts of original research, study, or experimentation conducted by the author(s).
- usually written at the time the research is occurring or shortly after the research is complete
- typically published in scholarly, peer-reviewed, journals
Clues for finding primary sources:
- Primary source articles in Psychology generally contain standard components, such as an abstract, a methods section, discussion, a conclusion and a bibliography
- Try reading the abstract of an article and look for statements like:
- Our research concluded that . . .
- We looked at two groups of children . . .
- The aim of our study was . . .
- The research we conducted shows . . .
