Research Guides: HPER 350: Sport Ethics: Finding Scholarly Articles

Narrowing Your Topic

Before searching the scholarly literature, be sure that your topic or research interest is focused. If you break down your research question or thesis, you should be able to come up with at least two key concepts.

For example:

College athletes AND economic rights
Public financing AND stadiums
Athlete endorsements AND brands AND young people

These are just rough examples, but they demonstrate a topic that is more focused and researchable than the commercialization of sport in general.

For more information about searching databases, see the Database Search Tips & Strategies and Using Advanced Search Features pages.

Recommended Resources

Once you have a better understanding of your topic in context, use this new knowledge to search for information in the scholarly literature.

Academic Search Premier This link opens in a new window
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Academic Search Premier is a general coverage database providing full-text access to thousands of scholarly journals across a wide range of disciplines, including history, social science, library science, computer science, language and literature, art, education, and life sciences.
Business Source Premier This link opens in a new window
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Business Source Premier is a business research database that includes the full text for more than 2,300 journals. Business Source Premier provides full text back to 1886, and searchable cited references back to 1998.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
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JSTOR is a multi-disciplinary database providing archival access to scholarly journals in the arts, language and literature, history, sciences, and social sciences. Typically, the most recent three to five years of a journal are not available through JSTOR.
Expanded Academic ASAP This link opens in a new window
Expanded Academic ASAP offers balanced coverage on a wide-range of topics including social sciences, humanities, education, science and technology.

Additional Resources

Google Scholar
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Google Scholar searches academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Be aware that many of the results that Google Scholar returns are not peer-reviewed journal articles. Still, it can be a helpful tool for searching a broad range of sources that go beyond those available in library databases.
BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine)
BASE is a search engine specifically for academic web resources, many of which are available in full text. BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.