1. Ethics in Sport and Physical Activity
95-225
Fall 2018
Finding Academic Journal Articles
Presented By
Katharine Ball

2. Help Is Always Available!
October Onwards:
Until October:
Sharon Munro
HK Librarian
Room 108, 1st Floor
West Building
Leddy Library
Tel.: (519) ext. 3850
Katharine Ball
Business Librarian
Room 214B, 2nd Floor
Tel: (519) ext. 3852

3. Learning Outcome For Today
You should be able to find academic journal articles and other resources to support your group debate statement.
I will focus mainly on academic journal articles

4. Academic Journals vs Magazines
What kind of articles are published in academic journals?
Academic journal articles usually report the results of research in a particular discipline. They tend to be narrow in scope and are written by, and for, professors, researchers, and other professionals. They are a permanent record of scholarship in the discipline and help to promote discussion and analysis in that field.
Academic journal articles are usually peer-reviewed or refereed.
What does this mean?
Articles are evaluated by experts in the field before they are accepted for publication in the journal.

5. Example of a peer-reviewed journal article

6. How do you find journal articles on a topic?
There are many thousands of academic journals published every year.
No one has the time to browse through all of them looking for relevant articles, so:
Most academic journals are indexed in discipline-oriented databases, allowing you to search by author, title, and keywords, etc.
Journal databases make life much easier!

7. How do you select which databases to search?
You need a database that indexes the journals published in the field in which you are interested – in this case, human kinetics
Does anyone know the name of the most human kinetics focused database?
SportDiscus

8. How do you select which databases to search?
However, because human kinetics is a very multidisciplinary field, you may also want to search databases in other fields, such as:
PsycInfo sports psychology
Business Source Complete sports management
PubMed kinesiology
or, broad databases that cover many disciplines, such as:
Google Scholar
Scopus
Web of Science

9. Where do you find these databases?
The Leddy Library ( home page is the basic starting point Go to Search Articles & Research Tools and Select Human Kinetics Sometimes you may need to use the A-Z list ( On campus: you should be able to access all the databases without signing on Off campus: sign on with your UWindsor ID and password

10. Determine the main concepts in your debate statement
For Example:
Education programs are effective in preventing doping among university athletes
What are the main concepts in this statement?
Education Programs
Doping
University Athletes

11. Identify keywords to search for each concept: synonyms, related, broader, and narrow terms, variant spellings, opposites
Education Programs
Doping
University Athletes
Awareness Campaigns Programs Prevention Education Training
Education Programmes
Drugs Drug Abuse Substance Abuse Steroids Cocaine Anti-Doping
College Athletes College Sports University Sports College Sport University Sport Student Athletes Varsity Sport Tertiary Level Athletics Elite Athletes
What do you do if you cannot think of any additional keywords?
Search the original keywords in the journal databases
Look at the results, and jot down the vocabulary you see authors using in their articles
It is helpful to do this anyway!
You could also try a thesaurus

12. How to join keywords to make a search statement
Boolean Logic OR
Returns results that contain any, some, or all of the keywords
Capitalization is often optional (but not with Google or Google Scholar)
Often used to broaden a search by linking synonyms
e.g. fruit OR vegetables
e.g. drugs OR doping OR steroids
AND
Returns only results that contain all of the keywords
Capitalization is often optional
Narrows your search
e.g. rivers AND salinity
e.g. athletes AND doping

13. How to join keywords to make a search statement
Truncation
Returns results that begin with the same keyword stem
The * is the most common symbol used
e.g. sport* Will retrieve sport, sports, sporting, etc.
e.g. athlet* Will retrieve athlete, athletes, athletic, athletics, etc.
Phrase Searching
Returns results that contain the keywords together
Quotation marks are used to denote a phrase
e.g “education programs”
e.g “college athletes”

14. How to join keywords to make a search statement
Using parentheses and the order of operations: the search engine will process what is inside the parentheses first
e.g. (drugs OR doping) AND (college athletes OR varsity sport)
Going back to our debate statement and the keywords we came up with, can you put together a search phrase?
You do not have to use all the keywords at once. Often it is better to do many simpler searches. There will be overlap and duplication in the results, but that can be dealt with. You may want to keep track of your searches, either manually or using search history options within the databases.
e.g. “education programs” AND (university athletes OR college sport) AND anti-doping

15. How to enter keywords into databases
If the database you are searching has multiple search boxes, then you can put the keywords for each concept into separate boxes
In many databases, there are also other ways to help define your search, e.g. limiting by date

16. If you have not already tried a live search, do it now!
Go to the SportDiscus database

17. What to do with the results of your search
Scan the results pages. Re-sort and set/reset limits, if necessary
Do a preliminary evaluation of your results. Check the basic citation information presented. Look at the detailed records and read the abstracts, as needed
Select the articles that seem to be a good fit with the focus of your debate statement If the results are not that relevant, then re-think your search strategy.
Some of the articles are available within the databases as .pdf files. Others, you will have to click on the Get It button to find the article in question.
Make notes of additional vocabulary that you might want to incorporate into future searches in this database and others
Go to the Print/Save/ /Download options.
You should always save the citations and full-text as you go along!

18. Format Your Journal Citations in APA Style
You can do this in the Save function of many databases, you can use the References function within Microsoft Word, you can use a variety of free software such as Zotero, or you can do this manually.
This is the most commonly used guide, from Purdue University: APA Style (
E.g.
Wippert, P. M., & Fliesser, M. (2016). National doping prevention guidelines: Intent, efficacy and lessons learned – a 4 year evaluation. Substance Abuse, Treatment, Prevention and Policy, 11, 1-7. doi: /s

19. Other Resources You May Use To Support Your Debate Statement
A few examples:
Sports statistics and data guide
Canadian Newsstand Complete
Sport Canada
Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport
Canadian Fitness and Lifestyle Research Institute
World Anti-Doping Agency

20. Evaluating Resources Found On The Web
There will be times when you want to include web resources.
Remember that anyone can publish online and there is no editing/quality control function. You must evaluate the web resources yourself.
Many University libraries have guides to help you. Here is one from the University of Edinburgh:
resources/library-databases/databases-overview/evaluating-websites

21. Questions?