Primary Articles vs. Review Articles

Primary articles consist of original material, written by a group or individual, detailing events they have experienced, or data they have obtained while performing an experiment. Before being published, these articles are evaluated by professionals on their ability to answer research questions and their discussions regarding the experiment. These articles may also have detailed sections including, an introduction, methods, results, and a discussion.

           Review articles are a secondary source of writing which may use primary articles as source material. These articles will summarize the data obtained from research and the information discussed within primary articles. Review articles may also be published within scientific journals, books, and other sources of media.

           The scientific peer-review process is very detailed, and it may take several months or years to complete. When a group or an individual conducts research, and obtains data they want to share, they will first write a draft consisting of their findings and data. Next, this draft will then be submitted to an academic journal where the editor will consider it for publication. Sometime after, experts within the same field will also evaluate this draft on its ability to answer questions and its analysis of data. If it is approved, the author may have to revise the article before it can be published. The journal editor will either approve of the newly written article, or it could be rejected for publication.

           A review article is one type of article, and it is a summary of information regarding research found within primary articles. It may be peer-reviewed before being published in an academic journal. Peer-reviewed journals may consist of a review article, but they may also contain primary articles, and meta-analyses. The journal itself may be peer-reviewed, but some articles may have not gone through the peer-review process. The peer-review process is important in publishing a review article and journal.

           The article published in the Journal of Autoimmunity and titled ‘The epidemiology and pathogenesis of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak’ is the review article. This article does not contain any original research and also does not include a methods, results, and discussion section. This article is a summarization of data gathered from other articles/journals. The article titled ‘Identification of a new human coronavirus’ is the primary article. This article has a results and discussion section. It contains many graphs and tables which reflect on original data collected from an experiment.