Facts and details that have been drawn from documents rather than from other, more recent, explanatory articles or books. The main distinction is that primary materials are the documents or other non-text evidence (incl., newspapers, media programs, interviews, coins, etc.) that are produced at the time. (Also often referred to as “primary sources.”)

A Guide to Reading and Analyzing Academic Articles, by Amanda Graham, 1997-2012, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.