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"The term evidence-based practice refers to an approach in which current, high-quality research evidence is integrated with practitioner expertise and client preferences and values into the process of making clinical decisions."
- ASHA Position Statement: Evidence-Based Practice in Communication Disorders
This guide is intended to help you find evidence for your projects and research papers at the Institute. If you have additional questions, please Ask a Librarian for further assistance.
In the health and social sciences, most often a primary source is a report of the results of an experiment or research study. The most common source format these take are published articles found in scholarly journals or conference papers.
Why Choose Primary Sources
Primary Sources represent the best evidence to support an argument. When you examine a primary source, you get to see all of the relevant information about the study as well as the authors' interpretation of the results of that study. You can then come to your own conclusions about the significance, relevance, and meaning of those results as they apply to your topics of interest. If instead you rely on the interpretations of another author, say from a literature review or other secondary source, you can run into trouble, because their point of view might cloud their interpretations and could lead you astray. Therefore, when you can, you will want to select primary sources to cite in your papers and other academic work.
Identifying Primary Sources
However, not everything published in a scholarly journal or presented at a conference will be a primary source. Here are some things to look for.
Use these links to go directly to full text of ASHA journals. For articles from older issues, please search our ASHA subscriptions directly: ASHAWire
Often, before you are ready to look for research articles, you need to become more familiar with the basics of your topic. We call that background information, and that usually consists of things like basic definitions, prevalence data, and standard interventions and diagnostic tools.
That type of information can be difficult to find in primary sources (aka research articles), so using secondary sources like textbooks, reference books (such as an encyclopedia), government or organization websites, etc is usually the way to go. Here are a few places you might start.
You can find lists of the CSD textbooks Bellack Library has on our Course Reserves page and on our general guide to CSD resources.
