Physical Education & Sport Studies

When you go to the library webpage - sunybroome.info - you will see a "Quick Search" box.  This looks very much like Google, and works the same way!

The tabs across the top of the search box give you options to limit your search from the beginning by material type.

• "Everything" is exactly what it says - you will search across all the materials in the catalog.
• "Articles" will return just articles from magazines, newspapers, and journals. 
• "Books and Media" searches books INCLUDING EBOOKS, as well as videos.
• "Reserves" are course reserves.  (This collection is primarily textbooks located at the library circulation desk, and probably NOT a limiter you will be using for this assignment.)
• "Journals" searches journal TITLES, not the contents of the journal.  For example, if you want to see if we have access to Runner's World magazine, you would enter the journal title here.  If you want to find an article about marathon running, you should use the "Article" search.
• The "Other Libraries" tab will expand your search across SUNY.  While we can get materials from other libraries, it will not be immediate, so if you need to use this option, plan ahead!  The option to expand your search can also be found within your search results, so this librarian recommends seeing what is locally available first.

1. Play with keywords, and start broad - especially if you aren't sure what direction you want to go.  A keyword search like "sports gender" (without the quotation marks)  returns a list of 56,000+ results!  And that is obviously too much.  That's where the limiters on the left-hand side of the result screen can help. 
   • Which limiters will be most useful?
     • Unfortunately, the answer is often "it depends"...but here is this librarian's starting point.
       • I don't want to read very technical research papers yet - so I'm going to select Magazine Articles from the left side of the page.  This eliminates most of the peer-reviewed research journals, and still leaves me with over 4,000 results.
       • Then I looked at the Subject list on the left - I decided to see what was included under the heading "Women." Now I'm down to 457 results - but as I skim the first page, these look a little older than I want (late 1990s - early 2000s).
       • I decide to use the Publication Date box, and set the years to 2015-2024.  Now I have 116 results!  And I can quickly browse the first page or 2 to see if any of them are relevant and interesting to me.
   • What if I get down to a small(ish) pile of results, and I don't like any of them?
     • Try again!  Select different limiters, change or add a keyword, just keep working with it.  You don't always get the best results the first time...think of researching this topic like playing a sport.  Most of us aren't great athletes the first time we play the game.