Glossary: Primary Source
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A primary source provides direct, firsthand evidence of an event or fact under discussion: original data collected at the time, a direct recording made, an official document issued, an eyewitness account given, rather than a later description or interpretation of that same material, produced instead by someone else entirely removed from the event.
Primary sources are genuinely valuable precisely because they sit closest to the underlying evidence itself, but they are not automatically free of bias or error either, an eyewitness account, for instance, is still shaped considerably by one person's limited perspective, memory and vantage point at the time the event unfolded.
Checking a claim against its primary source, where one genuinely exists and remains accessible, remains one of the most reliable single steps in the entire verification process available, though it is not always practical or even genuinely possible to do so in every single case that comes up.