naiyere khudadad shahri

Archival documents and records are considered as an authentic and primary source for scientific researches. However, in research methodology books they are either not mentioned as a source of information or studied very briefly. Authors of this paper intend to scrutinize the document issue from different perspectives in a series of articles. The following paper, as the first work of the series of articles, is going to provide some information about document as an authentic and primary source of scientific researches and its importance. Regarding this, they are first of all going to introduce archive, the place where documents are kept. Following this, they outline an overview of the document, its importance, and its usage in research.