Sport research/Finding research

Make sure you look everywhere for literature to make sure you have the research area covered. Sometimes you never know where you will find it

Ben Rattray explains how he uses Google Scholar in his research. Copy on Youtube. Copy on Archive.

Useful types of research

Generally other peer reviewed and published research in scientific journals offer the most compelling arguments for justifying your research question or explaining the results that you have found in your research. This type of research / literature is the most common and the focus of this section. Other evidence may also be important to your research however and you should use what is best to make the particular point you are trying to make. Opinions or common practices by coaches for instance often provide strong reasoning for research which may be found in interviews, blogs or magazines. Importantly, wherever you find evidence, you should reference it appropriately.

Finding stuff

Universities often spend a lot of money on subscriptions to journals and associated databases, so it's not suprising that they tend to teach these methods. And they are effective, but I personally don't use them, and find google scholar, my own online network, google seaches and the lists of citations and references from the articles I am interested in as being much more powerful than library databases. But it is (probably) important to understand and be able to use both. The library one's tend to relate to The University of Canberra library, which is where I work at the time of writing this.

Library Databases

Most libraries tend to run their own workshops on finding research, so get yourself on one. The University of Canberra library runs online workshops on information literacy and finding journal articles (fairly general). The UC library databases and other online resources can be accessed by anyone, although the content of journal articles may not be.

Real world approach

1. Search google scholar. Here's a short video tutorial to google scholar by albertsonslibrary, 5:17. Become familiar with at least these options in google scholar

Scholar preferences - Library links and Bibliographic Manager

Advanced Scholar Search - Find articles options (and note the short-cut expressions when you get the results), Author and Date options.

Cited by link

2. Have your online network tell you about it

See Using the internet for learning and research

3. Try a normal google search
4. Use the references and citations of good articles you have found
5. And don't forget to do simple things like directly ask your supervisor, other researchers, teachers and colleagues.

Keeping up to date

1. Re-do the searches
2. Keep checking the citations of the really key articles you have found
3. Have a good network
4. Subscribe to RSS feeds

Task

1. Find a minimum of 10 peer reviewed original research (i.e. not reviews) articles using google scholar.
2. Get a copy of each article. If the articles are not open access, or you or your institution does not have a subscription to the journal, see if your supervisor(s) can help you out.
3. Check the articles and see if there are other key articles to your area that those articles are referencing.
4. Once you have those extra key articles, find all of them again on google scholar and check to see if they have been cited by others. Check through those citations for other, more recent, key articles.
5. You may want to enter these into a bibliographic manager (see Bibliographic tools), if using RefWorks or Endnote then google scholar can assist this with one click.

Resources

Using the internet for learning and research for lots of tips on searching and networks.

A list of open access journals in the Sport Science field as well as another shorter list.

The University of Toronto has an excellent resource on critical reading and researching