If you clicked the link to the journal above, logged in, and did a basic topic search, you probably have a long list of results - and it is still strange and overwhelming. So, what do you do?
Here is my research process:
- I did a search in the Journal of Sports History for "football."
- I got 1422 results! Yikes.
- BUT - now I'm going to scroll through the list of results - NOT to find the One Article That Is Perfect For This Paper, but to see what topics might connect, and spark my own curiosity.
Just on the first page of results, I can see some common themes - black players, the Crisis of 1905 (? - and that made me wonder what the heck that was!), media portrayals of football.
- Then I saw "John L. Griffith and the Commercialization of College Sports on Radio in the 1930s." This reminded me of something I heard more recently, about the campaign to pay college athletes. I wondered if, were I to write a paper about money in college sports more broadly, this article might give me some interesting information to start with.
