Intro to Nursing Research for Graduate Students

Original research is considered a primary source.

Original Research

• is the report of a study written by the people who did the research.
• the researchers explain their research methods.
• the researchers describe their hypothesis and purpose of the study.
• the results are reported.

There is no one way to easily tell if an article is a research article. The only way to be sure is to read the article (or the abstract) to verify that it is written by the researchers and that they explained their findings, in addition to listing their methods, and results.

There a few key ways to quickly decide whether or not your article of interest is based on original research: 

• View the PDF version so you can plainly see the major subdivisions that should be present in a research article:
  • Literature Review or Background
  • Methods
  • Results
  • Conclusions
  • Discussion
• Read through the abstract first. The abstract of the article usually contains those subdivision headings where each of the key sections are summarized individually. 
• Use the checkbox with CINAHL's advanced search to only see articles that have been tagged as research articles. 

Additional things to look for to determine if it is Original Research

Author

Since the original research article is reporting the results of new research, the authors should be the scientists who conducted that research. They will have expertise in the field and will usually be employed by a university or research lab.

Audience

An original research article will be written by and for scientists who study related topics. The article should use precise, technical language to ensure that other researchers have an exact understanding of what was done and how to replicate the study. There will always be citations from previous works included. The article will be published in an academic journal, follow a scientific format, and undergo peer-review.

• The abstract or title uses the phrase Literature Review. This means the author is reviewing and summarizing all the current literature in a specific subject. The author of the article was not the one who conducted the research that is being discussed.
• The abstract or title uses the phrase Meta-Analysis. This means the author is doing an analysis of data from several existing independent studies of the same subject.