Social Work: Articles in Research Databases

Use the library's research databases for topics in social work.

The library's research databases contain information about journal articles (and sometimes, the full text of the articles themselves.)  You can think of a database as a search engine for the scholarly literature.  You can search a database as you would search Google, but instead of a single search field, a database offers many more options, filters and search criteria to bring you specific information about your topic.

For a complete list of databases, visit the A to Z List of Databases.

PsycINFO and PsycARTICLES

The library's largest resource devoted to peer-reviewed literature in mental health and behavioral sciences

ProQuest Psychology Journals - This database provides abstracts and indexing for key Psychology titles, many which are available in full text. Coverage ranges from behavioral, clinical, cognitive, developmental, experimental, industrial and social psychology, along with personality, psychobiology and psychometrics.

CINAHL Ultimate

Comprehensive source of full-text for nursing & allied health journals, providing full text for more than 1,300 journals indexed in CINAHL

PubMed

The National Library of Medicine's online article database with over 33 million citations in biomedical literature from Medline, life science journals and online books

More Databases:

Writing a Search Strategy

In general, it is recommended that you work with a librarian to help you design comprehensive search strategies across a variety of databases. Writing a successful search strategy takes an intimate knowledge of bibliographic databases.  

Using boolean logic is an important component of writing a search strategy.  This can be tricky, because each database operates a little differently.  However, some general rules of thumb are that:

• "AND" narrows the search
• "OR" broadens the search 
• "NOT" excludes terms
• "*" finds all forms of a particular word
• parentheses ensure all terms will be searched together as a set 
• quotations around a phrase searches that exact phrase