Exercise 1: "Peer-Reviewed" Doesn't Mean "Primary" — Possible Solution ========================================================================= The friend's reasoning conflates two genuinely separate properties of an article: whether it went through peer review, and whether it reports original data. Peer review is a real quality-control process journals apply to many different kinds of articles - original research reports, review articles, meta-analyses, and even some opinion pieces can all be peer-reviewed in a given journal. It says something about whether the article's own reasoning and methods were checked by other experts before publication - it says nothing about whether the article itself generated new data or instead summarized data that already existed. An original research article, reporting a study's own new data for the first time, is a primary source - it's as close to the actual evidence as a reader can get. A review article, even if published in the exact same peer-reviewed journal, synthesizes and interprets many earlier primary studies without collecting any new data itself - that makes it a secondary source, regardless of how rigorous its own peer review process was. So "peer-reviewed" answers the question "was this checked by other experts?" while "primary vs. secondary" answers a completely different question: "does this report new evidence, or does it interpret evidence someone else already reported?" A source can be peer-reviewed and primary, peer-reviewed and secondary, or (in some fields) not peer-reviewed at all in either case. ANSWER: Peer review and source type are two separate properties. Peer review checks whether other experts reviewed an article before publication; primary-vs-secondary depends on whether the article reports new, original data or instead interprets existing data. An article can be peer-reviewed and still be secondary (a review article), so "peer-reviewed" alone does not establish that a source is primary. WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER ------------------------------ This correctly separates the two properties the friend conflated and explains, using the chapter's own original-article-vs-review-article distinction, exactly why the friend's reasoning doesn't hold.