Guides: RSW 471: Research in Recreation, Sports, and Wellness: Databases

Recreation, Sports, and Wellness Databases

OneFile: Physical Therapy and Sports Medicine This link opens in a new window
Search a subset of Gale Academic OneFile journals covering the fields of physical therapy, physical fitness, and sports medicine. The database offers a wide spectrum of information, including proven treatment techniques, experimental research reports, and more.
Formerly called Physical Therapy & Sports Medicine Collection
Health and Wellness This link opens in a new window
Browse or search authoritative medical information from reference titles, full-text medical journals, magazines, pamphlets, and videos. Provides information on the full range of health-related issues, from current disease and disorder information to alternative medical practices.
OneFile: Health and Medicine This link opens in a new window
More than 2,500 full-text periodicals, reference books, pamphlets, and hundreds of videos demonstrating medical procedures and live surgeries. Includes nursing and allied health journals, as well as personal health information sources.
Formerly called Health Reference Center Academic
OneFile: Hospitality and Tourism This link opens in a new window
Search a subset of Gale General OneFile journals along with travel guides and reference titles covering the hospitality and tourism fields. Offers current and relevant content that provides coverage of both the historical and current state of affairs in both industries.
Formerly called Hospitality, Tourism, and Leisure Collection

Other Useful Databases

Academic Search Ultimate This link opens in a new window
Academic Search Ultimate offers access to resources cited in key subject indexes. The combination of academic journals, magazines, periodicals, reports, books and videos meets the needs of scholars in virtually every discipline ranging from astronomy, anthropology, biomedicine, engineering, health, law and literacy to mathematics, pharmacology, women’s studies, zoology and more.
Academic OneFile This link opens in a new window
Provides millions of articles from over 17,000 scholarly journals and other authoritative sources—including thousands of podcasts and transcripts from NPR and CNN as well as videos from BBC Worldwide Learning. Includes extensive coverage in key subject areas such as biology, chemistry, economics, environmental science, history, marketing, political science, and psychology.
ERIC This link opens in a new window
Articles, research reports, and digests from education-related journals and the U.S. Department of Education.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
A collection of core scholarly journals, many going back to the first volume. Emphasis is on back issue coverage and does not include the current 3-5 years, unless Gordon has a current subscription to the journal. JSTOR provides long term preservation for journals.
Medline This link opens in a new window
Created by the United States National Library of Medicine, MEDLINE is an authoritative bibliographic database containing citations and abstracts for biomedical and health journals used by health care professionals, nurses, clinicians and researchers.
APA PsycINFO This link opens in a new window
World's largest resource devoted to peer-reviewed literature in behavioral science and mental health. Produced by the American Psychological Association, it includes more than 4 million bibliographic records and indexing of more than 2,500 journals.
SocINDEX with Full Text This link opens in a new window
A comprehensive sociology research database that contains full text for more than 630 journals and magazines, as well as books, monographs, and conference papers. Covers various areas of study including gender studies, criminal justice, social psychology, racial studies, religion and social work.

Tips for Searching in Library Databases

WHAT CAN I FIND IN A LIBRARY DATABASE?
Library databases are best used for searching for peer-reviewed journal articles. A great database to begin searching is Academic Search Complete.

KEYWORDS
The building block of a library database search is keywords. Keywords are central ideas or terms within your research question or problem. For example, if we were exploring the topic: what are the effects of noise pollution from boating or shipping on marine mammals?, we might extract the following keywords: prime numbers AND probability.

BOOLEAN SEARCH OPERATORS
Once you have your keywords identified (2-3 is a good place to begin), you then need to connect them together in a way the database understands how to search. This is done using the Boolean search operators AND, OR, and NOT. Connecting keywords using these search operators creates a search string. For example: prime numbers AND probability.

AND - narrow search, used to combine terms together and focus search results
OR - broad search, used to includes results that contain similar or like words, such as synonyms
NOT - narrow search by exclusion, used to exclude results containing a particular keyword

ENTER KEYWORDS IN DATABASE SEARCH BOXES

Enter each keyword onto its own search line. If you have an OR string, include the entire string in one search box.

SEARCH LIMITERS
Below the search boxes are limiters that can be set to help filter and narrow your results. To search for scholarly articles, remember to check the scholarly (peer-reviewed) checkbox. Other useful limiter options are the date range. Since you are analyzing contemporary topics, you might consider limiting the date range boxes to the last 5 or 10 years.

USING SEARCH RESULTS

Sort your search results by Date Newest so the most current information on a subject is at the top of your results.
Use the "Cited by" or "Cited References" features contained in many library databases to view a list of resources that have cited the particular article currently being viewed in their own work or are contained within the Reference list of the current article being viewed.

Do not limit your search to just one database. Instead look at a variety of databases both subject specific and interdisciplinary to make sure you are viewing the full scope of literature published on your topic.

RSW 471: Research in Recreation, Sports, and Wellness: Databases

Library Database A-Z List

Recreation, Sports, and Wellness Databases

Other Useful Databases

Tips for Searching in Library Databases