Skip to Main Content

Exercise and Sport Science

Using Truncation and Wild Card to expand your search

Truncation uses the * to replace up to 20 characters at the end of a word; this is useful to help you find all forms of a word

  • Example: tax*​
    • Finds taxes, taxed, taxation

Wild card searching uses the ? to replace one character in a word

  • Example: wom?n
    • Finds woman or women

Evaluate Your Sources

When you're ready to begin reading your articles, use these questions to help you determine the value of a source:

Does this help me answer my research question?
How does this source address all or part of your research topic?

Do you understand the source?
Does this source use unfamiliar terminology or jargon? Do you need any other background information in order to understand it?

Does this source follow your assignment instructions?
Make sure you know what type of source you are looking at. Newspapers and magazines are not scholarly sources; journal articles and book chapters are.

How are you going to use this source?
Does this source support your thesis, or does it provide counter-evidence that you need to address? Does it provide background information on your topic, or is it important, foundational research that your topic is based on? Will this source lead to additional information?
 

Saving Your Research

Once you've found an article, how do you save it?

There are several ways to save your articles. The easiest is to click on the Email button, and send the article, along with the citation and abstract, to yourself. If your article has HTML full-text only, or if it is abstract-only, emailing is the best way to save your research.

PDF full-text allows you to access the document exactly as it looked when it was published in print. To download the PDF, click the appropriate PDF button, then use the arrow button in the PDF screen to download.

You can also save your research directly in to Google Drive in some databases:

For EBSCO Databases:

  • click the Google Drive button and sign-in EBSCO Google Drive Button

 

For ProQuest Databases: 

  • Click the Save button 
  • Then select Google Drive