What is a Primary Source?
Primary sources in the health sciences are documents or records that report on a study, experiment, trial, or research project. They are usually written by the person who did the research, conducted the study, or ran the experiment. These sources include the hypothesis, methodology, and the results. Primary sources include:
- Pilot/prospective studies
- Cohort studies
- Survey research
- Case studies
- Lab notebooks
- Clinical trials and randomized trials
- Theses and dissertations
How to Find Primary Sources
- CINAHL Complete This link opens in a new window
This link opens in a new window
An expanded version of the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health. Provides citations and abstracts for over 5,400 nursing journals, as well as books, conferences, software, and audiovisual material. Provides the full text for over 1,300 of those journals.
Be sure to search using CINAHL Complete's Advanced Search screen. Scroll down to Publication Type and select one or more of the following:
- Case Study
- Clinical Trial
- Doctoral Dissertation
- Masters Thesis
- Randomized Controlled Trial
You can hold down the CTRL key to select more than one type of primary source.
- MEDLINE (ProQuest) This link opens in a new windowBibliographic database produced by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. With coverage from 1946 to the present, the database contains millions of citations, derived from thousands of biomedical and life science journals, and indexed with Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®) from the NLM controlled vocabulary.
The database contains a broad range of medical topics relating to research, clinical practice, administration, policy issues, and health care services.
Subject content includes anatomy; communication disorders; microbiology; paramedical professions; pathology; physiology; psychiatry; toxicology; dentistry; parasitology; reproductive biology; epidemiology; gene therapy; surgical and pharmaceutical intervention; nursing practice; ethical and legal issues; institutional operations; laboratory techniques and procedures; diagnosis and management; clinical research trials and experimental treatment protocols; legislation and regulation; allied health specialties; continuing education; investigational drugs and new drug uses, and some veterinary medicine.
Be sure to search using MEDLINE's Advanced Search screen. Scroll down to Publication Type and select one or more of the following:
- Case Study
- Clinical Study
- Clinical Trial
- Controlled Clinical Trial
- Randomized Controlled Trial
You can hold down the CTRL key to select more than one.
- PubMed This link opens in a new windowMore than 24 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.
Start by searching terms in the search box. From your search results screen, go to the top left column "Article types." Click on "Customize ..." and then check the boxes next to one or more of the following:
- Clinical Trial
- Controlled Clinical Trial
- Randomized Control Trial
Then click on "Show" at the bottom of the Article types pop-up box.