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HWS100: Introduction to Health, Wellness, & Sport: Finding an article

What am I looking for?

Your article for the journal article review assignment must be a scholarly journal article that is an experimental study.

How do you tell if it's scholarly?

  • Make sure it isn't from ESPN, Sports Illustrated, or look like it's from a magazine
  • Look for the author's affiliation to determine their expertise areas.
  • Check that it has a list of references
  • Google the name of the journal to see if it's a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal

How do you tell if it has an empirical study?

  • Look for phrases like "the purpose of this study" or "a study was conducted" in the abstract on the results page.
  • Make sure your article has section headers that include a methods, results, and discussion section.
  • Other indications include looking for words like surveyed, tested, or mention of how many or who were the 'subjects.'
  • Avoid articles that talk about "literature studied," "meta-analysis," "case study," or the authors simply looking at other people's studies of the issue. This means they didn't do an experiment; they just looked at other people's. This will not work for this assignment.

If you're not sure if your article works, email the full-text of the article to Becky (bcanovan@dbq.edu) to ask.

Searching SPORTDiscus

Academic Search Premier is a general database that contains both popular and scholarly articles from a variety of disciplines and sources. Great place to start if you need to confirm the viability of a topic.

The tips in this video will apply to most other EBSCO databases, including SocINDEX, CINAHL, SPORTDiscus, and more. Subject specific databases may have some special features like unique limiters, but otherwise they will function the same way. The name of the database will be listed above the search bar: