Primary articles are published texts that researchers share about their studies or experiments. They are often found in peer-reviewed journals, but they serve the purpose of explaining the tasks and findings done by researchers on specific topics. Primary articles can also be called empirical articles or original research articles because they are done by the researchers themselves. It is similar to primary sources or autobiographies where they are written by the people who wrote the book or essays. Some sections that are included within primary articles are an introduction, a methods section, a conclusion with any findings, and in text citations to support any new discoveries that researchers want to share with other researchers in their field of study.

Review articles are a type of secondary source that function to summarize primary research. For example, if a group of researchers created a primary article on methods used to examine the effect of increased levels of dopamine on pregnant women, someone may create a review article on that same article to summarize it for people such as undergraduates or laymen that are not within the same field that the researchers were publishing their findings to. Secondary sources are available for alternate interpretations of primary articles and to give commentary or an evaluation on research topics. 

The review process of primary articles is an important portion of making primary articles what they are. Without reviewing these sources, researchers may be publishing information that is missing crucial details or not meeting the standards of their peers. The process begins when researchers send in an article of their experiment or study to a journal for publication. This article is then sent to other researchers within the field that the paper was written about by the journal’s editors; this is why it is called peer review since there are people who specialize in the field of what is being published that can look over any articles being submitted to journals. The editors read over the article and provide feedback on whether they believe the article is within high enough standards to be published, and if the article does not get approved the researchers can revise and resubmit it. The peer-review process takes quite a while, from one article it said that it could take about a year or more to hear back from journals whether an article was approved or not. It is also a competitive process, and not many journals accept a large amount of articles for submission. When looking at the article titled Rapid and Sensitive Detection of SARS-CoV-2 Using Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, I noticed that it contained a detailed introduction, many figures, a methods section, a results section, and a list of references displaying other research similar to the one they are presenting. Another key factor is that this article has been published in a journal named Biomedicines in 2021. These are all components of what a primary article would have, so therefore this article is the primary source. When looking through the article titled Development of clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/CRSPR-associated technology for potential clinical applications, it had a similar layout to the primary article. The main differentiation was that when reading through the introduction, this article did not mention the work being presented as their own, it talked about other researchers throughout the article which is a clear sign that the article is a review article.