Conducting Your Own Research Project

Among the many types of reference materials you'll find in libraries are:

1. Encyclopedias
2. Journals and Magazines
3. Conference Proceedings
4. Indexes and Abstracts
5. Books

Encyclopedias are an excellent place to start for general information and an overview of the subject material. But in general you will probably not find specific materials related to tennis science. You may be able to use the encyclopedia for a general history of the subject for your report.

We've differentiate between journals and magazines in this section. Our definition of "journals" refers to a periodical (a magazine that is published on a scheduled basis) that is of a scientific or scholarly nature. A publication where the authors generally document (or journal) a research study. We distinguish this from a magazine which may contain stories and articles that may be fiction or nonfiction and are of general interest to the public. (This is not always the case - but for our purposes we'll differentiate the two in this manner. There are popular science magazines that sometimes "bridge the gap" between these academic journals and general magazines.)

Journal articles generally contain information on the latest scientific studies since the materials are published frequently. It generally takes a year or two before that latest research information is published in someone's book. Sounds like journals are a great resource! They are; but there are drawbacks. Journals are normally only found at university libraries. The materials often use math equations, specialized technical terminology, or are written at a very high reading level. These articles are not typically easy to read. One thing to keep in mind is that most journal articles begin with an "abstract" and end with a "summary". The abstract generally gives the reader "the big picture" of what the research project was about and the "summary" (or the last section in the paper) tells you what the researchers discovered. You might consider just reading the abstract and summary or results pages of a journal article.

Conference proceedings are very similar to journals. You'll typically find very similar types of papers in conference proceedings that you would in a scientific journal. At a conference, researchers meet at a specific location and papers are presented in front of an assembly. Those papers discussed at the meeting are published in the conference proceedings.

Indexes are book volumes that have titles of these different journal articles. Sometimes they even have a small abstract of the article. Indexes have lists cataloging the materials by subject and author. In recent years a lot of these catalogs have gone "on-line". The indexes can be looked at with the use of a computer and searches (similar to search engines on the Internet) can be used to locate materials.

Books: There are some books on tennis science and we'll list the ones we know of here. There are also some books on tennis in our Curriculum Bridges Section. (If readers would like to suggest other books please write us at tennisbooks@cislunar.com.) We've found these to be very helpful in our work. Again they may not be the easiest books to go through for young tennis scientists. It's our hope that as our project continues that our on-line textbook will become a helpful resource for middle and high school students.