This guide offers advice on finding primary and secondary sources.

A primary source is a piece of information that is generated by a witness, participant, or contemporary of an event, experiment, or time period under study.

When evaluating primary sources, consider who or what produced the material, where it was produced, when, and for what purpose.

Secondary sources interpret and/or analyze primary sources. Hence, they are further removed from an event / experiment / time period than primary sources.

Whether or not a secondary source is "scholarly" depends heavily on the expertise of the author, the intended audience, the methodology used to produce it, and the system in which it was vetted. 

The Library Catalog, accessible through the library's website at library.wlu.edu, serves as a portal to the library's books, ebooks, journals, and multimedia content. It searches across and within much of the libraries holdings, spanning print materials and our databases. Because it searches so much, expect significantly more results than you would find in a topical, format, or discipline specific database.

To find only academic journal articles within the Library Catalog:

1. Conduct your search as you would normally,
2. Use the provided filters on the left side of the results screen (when on a computer) to limit by
   Availability = "Peer Reviewed Journals" and Material Type = "Articles."