Your search strategy will determine the effectiveness of your results. Using the search tips described on this page, as well as trying a combination of terms, will help you define effective search strategies. It's common to start with a broad search such as skill development, but as you get more precise in your research, you can focus your search strategy to something more like this: "skill development" hockey athlet*. This would be a focused and effective search strategy to find articles about the topic of skill development in hockey that specifically mention one of the following words: athlete, athletes, athletic, or athletics.
Always take a few seconds to note the Subjects used on articles you like. These can be great terms to use to start another search or to try in another database. For example, if you typed the words volleyball mental aspect in a search box and you found a fantastic article, you'd want to note that subject terms used for that article are "Sports - physchological aspect" and "volleyball" and/or "volleyball players." Then you could use those Subject terms to search for additional articles in the databases.
Use search tips such as putting "quotation marks" around words you want kept together in your search. The databases will look for each word separately unless you tell them you want them searched as a phrase.
For example, you might try putting in the terms "resistance training" in quotes and then adding football as an additional term. This will ensure the words "resistance training" are next to each other when it searches the database which should result in a more focused search. The word football could be found anywhere in the record.
If words are typed into the search box in a string such as resistance training football, the database would look for those words anywhere in the record. This is not always a poor option, but putting quotation marks around the terms typically helps narrow the search.
Keep in mind that if you do use quotes, put them around terms that make sense next to each other. If you put "resistance training football" in quotes, the database needs to find those three words in a row. That's not likely to happen considering we wouldn't write "resistance training football" in a sentence. Anything in quotes needs to be found in the record or article exactly as you typed it.
Give these sample searches a try in the SPORTDiscus database to see the results for yourself.
Utilizing sources cited within articles is a smart way to take advantage of great resources you've already found. Say you've found a terrific article ...you'll want to take a look at the bibliography or footnotes to see if it leads you to other sources that might be useful for your research. Fully utilize the resources you find!
Take advantage of the truncation symbol * -- the asterisk used at the end of a word tells the search engine you want all forms of that word returned in your search results.
For example, putting the * at the end of coach* will search for coach, coaches, coached, coaching, coachable all in one search.
This will result in a larger search result set...so if your search is already too big, this isn't a great tool to use. On the other hand, if you're not sure you're getting a good glimpse at all of the articles you should be, then doing a truncation search can help you see more!