Library Blog: Anne Fitzgerald

This was definitely a good experience for me because I was completely unaware of the fact that subject librarians exist and they are extremely helpful in developing ideas on how to do research. I would say that the most important thing that I learned about from the meeting that I had with Megan and her assistant was how to better my search for research. We focused a lot on entering key words to narrow the topic: the most useful skill I learned was to include words like "AND" and "OR" to define the search a little more.

I would say that I am struggling to find a way to efficiently look through research, meaning that I spend a lot of time looking through research that I don't end up using. Another problem that I have is that I often come across an article that seems really interesting, but it has nothing to do with the topic that I am researching and thus skews my ideas or distracts me from my original research. I hope to improve my searching skills so that I will only come across articles that are relevant to the topic that I am researching.

I am currently researching the relationship between functional training and ACL joint stability in female athletes. There is a lot of research that has been done on this topic because female athletes often tear their ACL because of the angle between the hip and the knee: wider hips means more stress put on the knee. A lot of research has been done to prove that functional training will decrease the likelihood that a female athlete will tear their ACL in a non-contact setting.