PSY360: Sports Psychology (Garcia)

Planning Your Search - From Question to Keyword

Planning out your search strategy—especially the search terms you want to use—can make the research process easier. When picking out search terms (alternatively can be called "keywords"), look at your research topic or research question along with any smaller questions or parts, and pick out the significant nouns or ideas. These will be your search terms. You should also think of all of the various ways those nouns or ideas could be expressed - if one variation doesn't work, try another.

As you review search results and read articles:

• Look for the controlled vocabulary that the tool you are searching uses (i.e. the catalog and library databases). Controlled vocabulary is a set of assigned terms to describe an item that are used consistently across the tool to make searching easier. These can be described as subjects, subject terms, or thesaurus terms.
• Identify discipline terminology and jargon. How does the specific field you are researching in refer to a topic or idea? 
• Keep a list of search terms that you find to be useful for your topic/question that you can use to search various tools to find information and resources. Consider broader, narrower, and similar terms.

Here are some suggested keywords to use for your research assignments. This is not an exhaustive list of terms, but these keywords will help you get started! 

• sport*
• exercise
• "physical activity"
• "physical fitness"
• "team sport*"
• compet*
• athlet*
• "elite athlete*"
• "professional athlete"
• "women athlete*" OR "female athlete*"
• coach*
• "sports fans"
• fandom
• "sport* injur*"
• words that describe a specific type of sport or exercise (e.g. golf, football, CrossFit)

• "sports psychology"
• psychol*
• emotion
• motivation
• personality
• attitude
• cognition
• "mental health"
• wellness
• well-being
• "psychological well being"
• resilienc*
• anxiety
• depression
• self-esteem
• self-efficacy
• "body image"
• burnout

Qualitative research can be challenging to find as these methodologies are not always well-indexed in the databases. Here are some suggested keywords for retrieving articles that include qualitative research.

• qualitative
• ethnograph*
• interview*
• observation*
• survey
• "case study”
• narrative
• "focus group"

This are a few examples of how a search may be constructed using the Advanced Search screen in the Academic Search Complete database: