Sports Journalism & Sports Media: Search Strategies & Tips

It  is useful to begin by formulating your research topic as a question:

• What is the effect of sports media? Does the media promote good sportsmanship?
• What is the effect of brands in sports? Does identifying with a team improve the sales of a company?
• What are some challenges that sports journalists go through and the possible solutions.
• What are the roles of sports commentators on good sporting culture?

Choose the words that have substantive meaning  in your question:

• media, network, broadcast
• team, league, channel, authentication
• sports journalists, culture, good sportsmanship

The main concepts will be keywords used in your search!

It is helpful to think of synonyms or related terms for your main concepts:

• network-- channel, station, television
• journalist-- broadcaster, columnist, commentator, announcer
• league-- organization, club, group
• broadcast-- air, transmit, announcement, program

OR broadens  the search; use it to combine synonyms or related terms:

• team or organization
•  journalists or associated press
• sportsmanship or conduct

• AND narrows the search; use it to combine your concepts:

• network and broadcast

(media or networks) and (journalists or associated press or commentators) and  (team or organization)

 and (promoting or encouraging) and (sportsmanship or conduct)

• Terms connected by the OR should be in parentheses ()

• Using truncation will retrieve variations of words and is a good way of broadening your search.  The truncation symbol directs the database search engine to search for the root word and any ending. The most common sympbol is the asterik (*). For example, typing broadcast* would retrieve records containing broadcast, broadcasts, broadcasting, broadcaster, etc.  So, for the search on the media and journalists encouraging sportsmanship among organizations, would be:

(media or networks) and (journalists or associated press or commentators) and  (team or organization) and (promoting or encouraging) and (sportsmanship or conduct)