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Social Work Research Guide

Featured Books

Professional Identity and Social Work

This book examines professional identity in relation to social work by asking how practitioners think of themselves as a "social worker", a professional self-concept often entangled in a range of relations, beliefs, values and experiences.

Strengths-based child protection: Firm, fair, and friendly

... contains a rich combination of case studies, reflective questions, and exercises that enable students and practitioners to conceptualize and master implementing strengths-based practices with children.

Substance Abuse

This book provides readers with a basic understanding of substance abuse, especially as it relates to teens and young adults, plus resources and guidance for overcoming it. 

Social work practice : Integrating concepts, processes, and skills

[This book] has been widely used as a succinct and focused book to prepare human service providers in the key components underpinning direct practice.

Indigenous Social Work Around the World

Key theoretical, methodological and service issues and challenges in the indigenization of social work are reviewed, including the way in which adaptation can lead to more effective practices within indigenous communities and emerging economies, and how adaptation can provide greater insight into cross-cultural understanding and practice.

Social Policy for Social Work

The critical analysis provided in this book offers students of social work a crucial foundation for negotiating difficult and sensitive practice situations and defending their profession, providing them with the tools and knowledge to uphold key professional values.

OneSearch

  

Search Tips

This is the default of most databases and will return many results. 

The database will search for results where the keywords appear in the following fields:

  • Title,
  • Author,
  • Subject,
  • Publisher,
  • and Notes.

Keyword searching is a good place to start, especially when looking for words or terms to use for Subject Searching, but it also requires careful review to find resources that are most appropriate for your needs.

Items are tagged with precise words before they are entered into databases (this is called controlled vocabulary).

Using Subject Search will not give a lot of results but they are likely to be accurate.

Ask a Librarian for words to use when using Subject Searching.

Combine search words to produce specific search results:

  • AND reduces the number of results.
    • AND is useful when you want results that combine two ideas, e.g. students AND success.
  • OR broadens the number of results.
    • OR is useful when there are multiple ways to say one thing, e.g. education OR school OR teaching OR learning.
  • NOT limits your results.
    • NOT is useful if similar but irrelevant words keep appearing in your searches, e.g. education NOT training

Search for an exact phrase using quotation marks.

Using “student success in college” will search for those exact words in that exact order whereas not using quotes is essentially a keyword search and the database will search for those words in any order and in any combination.

Using quotes will give you less results but they will be more precise.

Social Work Databases

Open Access Social Work Journals

Online open access journals related to social work, some with full text articles, some with abstracts and some are indexes only.