Sport science

You don't need to have a clearly defined research question to start searching in the library databases, you can start with some key concepts. Once you have them you need to work on synonyms and related search terms, which are important because articles can be written using different words for the same concept, but the databases will only search for the terms you enter into the database.

You can use a worksheet  to develop you own keywords and to write down synonyms and related search terms:

Worksheet for keywords

Example of filled out worksheet:

Once you have your concepts, with synonymns and related search terms, you need to combine them in order to do your search. Below you can read more about combining search terms with OR and AND, as well as truncation and phrase searching.

Combining search terms with AND

physical activity AND obesity

• retrieves all of the concepts
• makes the search narrower

Combining search terms with OR

obesity OR overwieght

• retrieves any of the search terms
• makes the search broader
• the more search terms you combine with OR the better you cover the research area

Phrase searching

"physical activity"

• searches the specific phrase
• excludes articles where the search terms aren't written in the exact same order or next to eachother
• narrows the search

Truncation

obes* retrieves obese, obesity, obesogenic

• put an asterisk after the word stem (*)
• searches for different word variations
• broadens the search

When finding an interesting article you might want to try the strategies below in order to identify other related research articles

Backward chaining

Check the reference lists of relevant sources to see which works they have cited. This is a good way of find earlier research about your topic.

Forward chaining

You can also check if your chosen source have been cited by someone else. This works best for articles that are a few years old, as they are more likely to have been cited than brand new sources. In Google Scholar, Search for the title and click "Cited by..." to find other works citing your chosen source.