Library video script: SPORTDiscus

• SPORTDiscus is a comprehensive, bibliographic database covering a wide range of sport literature and related disciplines. It also provides some full text articles.
  This podcast will demonstrate how to carry out a search for journal articles on SPORTDiscus.
  To find this resource from the library website, simply follow the breadcrumb trail as shown here. You can also view the Finding electronic resources podcast on the help and guidance page of the library website.
  Click on Access the service.
• And you are taken to the advanced search page.
• We'll start by entering our main search keyword or words into the first search box.
  We'll use physical activity as an example. Now click on Search.
• You can see that this has returned a large number of results which is far too many to scan through. We therefore need to refine our search by using additional search techniques and adding more search terms to narrow down the search.
• One search technique we can use is to add quotation marks around our search terms to search for the words as a phrase rather than as individual words.
• Adding more keywords will also narrow your search and retrieve less but more relevant results.
  As you can see, we've added mental health and child in the second and third search boxes. AND is used to combine different search terms in this way.
• This has now reduced results considerably to 72.
  Another useful tip to ensure really good quality information is to select Peer reviewed from the Refine Your Results section. This limits results to articles from journals which have been reviewed and accepted by a panel of experts in the subject covered by the journal.
  You can also narrow your results further to search for articles within a specified date range. Then click on update...
• The results are now reduced to 35 peer reviewed journal article references published from 2006 onwards. Results are automatically sorted in order of relevance
• If you want more results, you should then start to add alternative words, known as synonyms, which have similar meanings to your keywords.
  When adding alternative words to your initial search terms, add them in the same search box and combine them with OR as shown here.
• We now have 66 results. This is a manageable number of results to scan through to decide which articles may be most useful.
• The articles retrieved will be a mixture of bibliographic details and, as in this case, a very small number of full text. If there is no full text link under the article, you will see the Find it at MMU link.
  This means that the full text of the article is not available on SportDiscus, However by clicking this option you can find out if MMU has subscribed access to the article.
• You can find out more information on using Find it! on the help and guidance section of the library website.
• If the article is available as full text simply click on the PDF Full Text link...
  You can then print off the article or save it to your MMU personal drive or pen drive.
• If you would like to find out more about advanced search techniques see the Advanced database searching techniques on the help and guidance page of the library website.
• For further help on using SPORTDiscus don't forget to check the Help pages of the database itself.
• If you have any further questions about SPORTDiscus, please do not hesitate to ask a member of staff in the Library who will be happy to help you.

^ Top of page