Original research. These include experiments, surveys, observations, etc.
AND / OR
Published literature reviews on your topic. If someone has already done a literature on your topic, or a closely-related topic, you can see what articles they thought were important. Don't rely on these articles alone.
As you review your search results, there are three things you want to look at:
Let's review a few examples. There are screenshots below, but links are also provided in case you want or need to review the item yourself.
The Title of the first example article is Culturally responsive literacy instruction: How is it reflected in the literature? The title gives us a pretty good idea that it is a literature review. You might see the phrases "literature review," "review of the literature," "systematic review," or "meta-analysis" in the titles of articles that are literature reviews.
The Abstract also gives us useful information, noting that the article is a "qualitative review of the literature."
In the Subjects section of this example article, we see "Literature reviews" is one of the assigned subjects. (It's underlined in red in the screenshot.)
The Title of the second example article is Listen to the Children: Elementary School Students' Perspectives on a Mindfulness Intervention. The title mentions students' perspectives; this suggests that the authors used some sort of tool or measurement to learn about those perspectives. Many article titles have words that indicate some sort of measurement - look for words like effects, impact, comparison, and others.
The Abstract builds on what we learned from the title; the students completed daily mindfulness activities, and the authors held weekly focus groups to learn their perspectives on these activities. The authors also mention doing a content analysis of the data they gathered from the focus groups.
The Subjects include the phrase "qualitative research," which is one major type of research (the other two are quantitative research and mixed methods research). The assigned subjects also include the phrases "focus groups" and "content analysis," which were in the abstract, too. Both are common data collection methods in qualitative research. For quantitative research, you might see the word "statistics" pop up in the subjects. (The relevant subjects are underlined in red in the screenshot above.)
If you're ever unsure whether an article includes original research, don't hesitate to ask a librarian or your instructor!
