ECON 55H: FYS Economics of Sports: Home

Learn better ways of doing research

My name is Nancy, and I'm your economics librarian. I was an economics major and loved my sports economics class. You can always email me or schedule a meeting to talk about anything, from what it's like to study economics, to picking a topic and finding articles, or using Google better.

Use this website to help you write your research paper for ECON 55H.

• Home: Start here. Watch the videos to learn about research.
• Find Articles: Use the databases listed here to find sources for your paper.
• Find Statistics: Sources for data about many sports. Rod Fort's sports data and Vrooman's Sports Economics are important.

If you want to learn more about writing, you can meet meet with a writing coach from the UNC Writing Center.

Picking a topic and brainstorming a research question

This video is an example of how to pick a topic and brainstorm a research question.

Developing keywords to find articles

Databases are only as smart as you tell them to be. Learn about keywords and why they're important.

If you prefer to read content, work through this short Developing Keywords tutorial for keyword basics and practice: https://libraries.usc.edu/tutorial/developing-keywords. You will need the Firefox browser.

If you prefer video content, watch the video below.

Evaluate your sources

It's really important to evaluate the sources you find. Are they credible? Are they appropriate to use for your paper? This video explains a method to evaluate your sources.

Why it's important to cite your sources

Why do we cite? Citations serve three major roles in scholarly work:

• They allow you to show how your argument is built upon the ideas of others.
• They allow you to indicate which ideas are taken from others, and from whom those ideas were taken; in other words, to give credit where it's due.
• They allow the interested reader to follow your argument and confirm its logic by investigating the ideas on which the argument is built, or to further explore those ideas on their own.

Learn about APA citation format: Citing Information Tutorial, APA

Learn How to Cite Data

Finding articles

Searching in databases is different than using Google. These 2 short videos demonstrate how to search in EconLit (database for economics articles) and a better way to use Google Scholar. Go to the Find Articles page for more suggested databases.

Have you found some articles? Here's a strategy for reading scholarly articles.