A primary source in nursing is an article written by the researcher(s) who performed the research experiment and includes original research data.
A primary research article contains the following:
- Introduction: Research question which defines the aim of the research
- Methodology
- Results
- Discussion/Conclusions
- References
There really isn’t a good way to limit your searches to primary research. The majority of published articles are primary research. You can visualize that by looking at the levels of evidence pyramid here and see that everything from Randomized Controlled Trials and below are primary research.
You could use [NOT review] in your search (without the brackets) to eliminate any articles that have the word “review” in them. That will at least get most of the systematic review articles out of your search results. In CINAHL, you can scroll down to some of the limiters on the initial search page and choose all the primary research study types from the levels of evidence pyramid under “publication type” (hold down the shift key to select more than one).
Ultimately, the best way is for you to use the criteria outlined in the evidence-based practice page on primary research to determine if the article you are looking at is primary research.
