1. Why do I require students to use primary research sources for most paper assignments?

   In academic psychology, we emphasize critical thinking based on theory and on evidence. By evidence, usually we are referring to the results of well-designed experiments. When you read information in a psychology textbook or in popular books or magazines, you are reading the author's interpretation of the evidence. I think it is important for college students to develop skills in finding, understanding, and evaluating the available research evidence. Sometimes you might be more skeptical about certain conclusions after you read how the study was done. Sometimes you might be convinced by the author's arguments after you read a carefully-controlled study with compelling results.
   Reading primary research sources will be a challenge. You might find that you have to read them more than once in order to understand them. There may be jargon, understood by experts in that field, that is confusing. You might find the description of the statistical analysis difficult to understand - in that case, look at the tables and figures and at the author's description of conclusions in order to find out what the main results were. The key is to be persistent and to spend a lot of time with each article.
   A more general reason I want you to tackle primary research sources is to help you feel confident to look for primary research information in other circumstances in the future. Perhaps you'll want to look up current information on some treatment in sports medicine, or research on family relationships for adopted children. Knowing how to look beyond the popular information available should be an asset.

A primary research source is a paper in which authors give the first thorough description of their study and results. Typically, in the field of psychology, a primary source that reports research is a type of journal article. Journals publish compilations of articles that are reviewed by experts in the field before being accepted for publication. If you look through a psychology journal, you may see some articles that are primary reports of research results. The article will have an introduction, where the authors provide a context for their experiment by describing previous theory and research. It will include a methods section with descriptions of the participants and procedures of the study, and a results section where the findings are described and analyzed statistically. Often the results section includes tables or figures. The discussion reviews the findings, connects them with prior work, and raises further questions. Not all journal articles report primary research (see question #4).

Textbooks, encyclopedias, most other books, and magazines are not primary research sources. The magazine Scientific American is not a primary research source. Journals such as Science or Nature include primary research articles (often you have to read the notes at the end to get information on methods); they also include other articles and letters that are not primary research sources. Books that are edited and have chapters that describe research are usually not primary research sources. Web sources may describe research but unless the source is a web-based publication, it is not a peer-reviewed description with the legitimacy of a journal article.

Other papers in journals may be review articles. These articles are not primary research articles, but rather are reviews of previous studies on a certain topic. In review articles, authors may go over many prior studies and may suggest new theories or new ideas about a subject. Sometimes journals publish editorials or letters -- those are not primary research sources.

Journals are located in the periodical section of the library. Go there and look at a journal such as Developmental Psychology. Can you find examples of primary research articles? of review articles? You can do a computerized search of the PsychInfo database at the library. You can do this via the web, or go to the library if you need help from the reference staff. You might try searching for keywords (for example, "play" and "childhood" and "pretend") and then combine the results of the three keyword searches so that you only get the articles that involve all three terms. Look through the titles to see what articles sound like primary reports of research studies. If the abstract is available, it will give you an idea of what the article is about. Then, look at the journal titles to see whether we have those journals at EOU or whether you need to request them through Interlibrary loan. Some primary research articles from journals are available, in entirety, via the web. This makes it easy to get quick access to an article; the only difficulty is that you won't know what page number to use if you want to include a direct quotation from that article in your paper.

E-mail the reference to me (title, author, journal title, and abstract) or bring it to me during office hours or after class and we'll talk about it.

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