RECR 1270: Applied Skills in Recreation Operations

The following article databases contain full-text articles from scholarly (peer-reviewed) journals, industry magazines, and other sources. You may use them to find articles relevant to your topic.

Research Tips:

• When looking for industry publication articles using SPORTDiscus, select the “Magazines” option in the Source Types section on the search results page.
• When looking for industry publication articles using Academic Search Complete, select the “Trade Publications” option in the Source Types section on the search results page.
• When looking for scholarly or peer-reviewed articles using SPORTDiscus or Academic Search Complete, select the “Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals” option in the Limit Your Results section on the main search page or the search results page.
• Due to different collections of publications in the databases, you may find more articles on your topic in one database than the other. If you find little in one database, try a different one.

• Use single words or short phrases – Databases work better with search words (than sentences). If you type in a long sentence, the database will search for all the words and you will probably get few results.
  E.g., instead of “how do I properly clean a swimming pool to prevent diseases,” try “clean AND swimming pool AND prevent AND disease”


• Try different combinations of search words and synonyms (words or phrases with the same or very similar meaning). You will also get ideas for other search words as you are searching in the databases.
  E.g., clean, disinfect, and sterilize


• How to combine search words:
  • Use quotation marks to search for a phrase – e.g., “wind energy”
  • Use AND between words to find results with all search words in (this narrows your results) – e.g., “wind energy” AND “British Columbia”
  • Use OR between words and phrases with similar meaning – e.g., “wind energy” OR “wind power” OR “alternative energy”


• Truncation – Use the asterisk symbol * to search for variant endings of a word (including singular and plural).
  E.g., searching prevent* would find a match with prevent, prevents, prevented, preventable, preventive, and prevention


• Precision – In article databases such as SPORTDiscus, use the drop down boxes to the right of the search box to make your search more precise by specifying where you want your search words to appear (e.g., in the title of the article, or in the article summary).