Physical and Mathematical Sciences Library
201 Davey Lab
814-865-3716
Nancy Butkovich
Title: Head Physical and Mathematical Sciences Library
Physical and Mathematical Sciences Library
201 Davey Lab
814-865-3716
Indexes are the best way to go. You can access all of the ones below from the Libraries A-Z list. In order to determine the best resources to use, you need to decide whether you need scholarly articles or newspapers and popular articles.
SPORT Discus It indexes journals, magazines, conference proceedings, and several other formats back to 1830. A lot of the international material isn’t available at Penn State, but you can get it from Interlibrary Loan. Just allow time for material to arrive.
INSPEC Indexes journals and conference proceedings back to 1969. This is a physics database, so don’t use physics as a subject heading! If you are getting too many records, qualify your search (for example: baseball and pitching). Some articles are available in full-text.
COMPENDEX It does for engineering what INSPEC does for physics and goes back to 1970. The comments about qualifying your search and full-text articles apply here as well.
PubMed Includes the Medline database, and covers the journals in the fields that make up medicine, including sports medicine. Records go back to 1966.
ProQuest (Multiple Databases) This multi-disciplinary database indexes magazines, newspapers, and a selection of scholarly journals. Full-text is available for some of the articles indexed.
Use The CAT (http://cat.libraries.psu.edu/). Advanced searching will probably work best, because most of the keywords and subject headings in this area are broad. Below are some “LC subject headings”. Try combining the subject headings in the first column with the ones in the second.
| Physics | Sports |
|---|---|
| Force and Energy | Olympic Games |
| Friction | Individual sport names, such as Golf or Baseball |
| Biophysics | |
| Biomechanics |
Reminder: Sometimes a book with a general heading (such as “Sports”) may have a chapter or two on your specific sport.
For more information about searching The CAT, go to the "Quick Guide to Searching in the CAT"
There’re a lot of Web sites on the science of sports, and new ones appear about as fast as old favorites disappear. Rather than make any recommendations, I’d suggest using your favorite browser and go searching. However, carefully consider your answer sets.
Just because something’s on the Web doesn’t mean that it’s true. There’s a lot of misinformation out there. When deciding whether or not to use a Web site as a reference, ask yourself some questions:
Who created the Web site?
Is the source credible? If it’s a personal Web site, what qualifications does the author have to indicate credibility? Library, museum, and government websites are usually reliable, although you should still look at the updating information and check for biases or errors.
When was it created or last updated?
Some material doesn’t need to be updated very often; other information does. If your topic is pretty dynamic with lots of new developments happening, the Web site that you want to use should be updated often.
Are there any obvious errors or biases in the information?
Errors in good sources are minor and few. If something seems odd or just not right, verify that information in another (independent) source. The same holds true for biases.
For more information about evaluating Web sites, go to the "How to Evaluate Information on the Web" tutorial
