How to Find a Primary Research Article

hello class mr linder here in this video i want to show you the easiest way to find a primary research article that you can use for your research paper this semester so on the screen you can see that i have google search engine open and what i want you to do is simply type in www.pubmed.gov and that will take you to the national library of medicine and national institute of health databases and this will give you all kinds of research articles for you to access for your research paper so one of the first things you

need to do is come up with a research topic and that can be anything that you want to choose that has a physiological basis so in this example i'm just going to choose something like pancreatic cancer as my topic and i'm just going to put that into the search in pubmed and what that does is that gives us a hundred and eight thousand six hundred and seventy three uh articles that we can take a look at now there's a couple things here not all of these articles are going to be primary research articles and not

all of these articles are going to be free for us to take a look at so what are we looking for in a primary research article we're looking for some sort of experimental design we're looking for the scientific method uh being used so you're looking for an introduction to a topic methodology to their research results that they have uh accumulated uh and then analysis of those results so a discussion or a conclusion uh section uh but obviously looking through a hundred and eight thousand articles isn't going to be helpful so one of the things that

we need to do first is to make sure that you have access to these articles so under the availability on this page you want to make sure that you click on the free full text so i'm going to go ahead and do that and that reduces our search down to 36 735 results still way more results than we need but better than the hundred and eight thousand what this has done is this has given us access to the free articles that you do not have to pay for now again though not all of these articles

are going to be primary research articles if you were to start scrolling through the titles of the articles you may notice that some of these are just sort of review or informational type articles this is epidemiology of pancreatic cancer pathogenesis and diagnosis so we want to make sure that we stay away from review articles or just informational based articles we also want to make sure that we stay away from case studies and we really want to find a research-based article on our particular topic so one of the other things that you can do to help

ensure that you're going to get a research based article is to do another filter and so under article types we want to make sure that we're looking for perhaps maybe clinical trials or some sort of meta-analysis although sometimes those are review type papers or even randomized controlled trials if they're doing a randomized controlled trial we know that they're doing some sort of typically some sort of research on maybe a particular drug and so that would be something to take a look at you'll notice that review and systematic reviews are also options but we want to

stay away from those we are looking for the scientific method at work so we want to see introduction you know a hypothesis we want to see research methods results and discussions or conclusions so oftentimes i just click on randomize controlled trials and that brings me down to 427 results for pancreatic cancer and typically now i'm going to find a research article so the first one here uh is actually looking at germline brca that's the broca gene and this particular gene can mutate in a variety of cancers particularly breast cancer but in this case they're looking

at its link to pancreatic cancer so this is most likely going to be a primary research article this very first one but we could scroll down and look at other options as well and there are certainly other things to look at and you can click on show more and look at all the other options but let's go ahead and look at the very first one here and the first thing that's going to come up when you click an article is the abstract for the article so this is a clinical trial it was published in the

new england journal of medicine uh this is uh in july of last year 2019 and so we have maintenance for uh germline uh brca mutated uh matastic pancreatic cancer uh and so here's the abstract for it and notice that it has the background the methods the results uh and the conclusions even in the abstract so we already know it's a primary research article because it's already showing us that information but just to verify we can go to the free full text so there's a free full text link right here we can go ahead and click

on that that's going to open up another window and it should have this new england journal of medicine article available for us to take a look at and and so here's the abstract again and then it starts with the introduction and and so we can read about that the methodology uh the patients that they uh were taking a look at and what they actually did and then it'll get into a results section and then of course a discussion and a conclusion uh so we know this is a primary research article uh it's related to our

topic pancreatic cancer uh and so we could use this uh for our research paper for the semester so i hope that helps take care