This guide should help you:
Primary Sources are articles that contain original research, or new research and findings. They are marked in the sciences by containing the following sections:
For most of the research that you do, you will be both looking for *and* using primary sources. Primary sources are indexed within academic databases - and we have lots of those for you to search through! Use the "Find articles" tab to look over these and start searching!
Secondary Sources are articles that contain summaries or explanations of someone else's original research. Secondary sources interpret and/or review primary sources - they do NOT contain original research.
Most of the time when you are doing Lit Review research, you will *not* be looking for secondary sources. However, some secondary sources are a nice summary of changes that have happened over time in a certain discipline or topic of study, so they can be useful in that way way. We have lots of secondary sources in our "Find articles" tab within this guide. Click on over and take a look!
Oddly enough, simply figuring out how to describe what it is that you are looking for can sometimes be the most difficult step of your research.
You know what your trafficked animal is, you know how to describe the issues surrounding this animal in a succinct paragraph to anyone who might ask, but how do you break it all down into just four or five words that encapsulate everything that it is you are looking for?
Coming up with the perfect combination of keywords to do this can be trickier than you might think! If you get stuck while working on this assignment, or keep getting too-few results than you think you should be, the words you are typing into the article search engines might be the problem. Give Susan a shout and she can help you make some small changes to your keywords to get better search results!
sebrazer@salisbury.edu