Research Guides: Child Welfare Policy: SSW 4306: Find Scholarly Articles

Topical or Subject Databases

Social Services Abstracts
Social Services Abstracts provides bibliographic coverage of current research focused on social work, human services, and related areas, including social welfare, social policy, and community development.
PAIS International
Public policy database that covers issues in the public debate through international sources including journal articles, books, government documents, statistical directories, grey literature, research reports, conference papers, web content.
PubMed

PubMed comprises more than 37 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites. MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online) is the largest component of PubMed and consists primarily of journal citations; articles indexed with MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) and curated with funding, genetic, chemical and other metadata.
Embase

EMBASE contains references to journal articles in biomedicine. The references consist of authors, title, journal data, abstract and keywords. EMBASE contains European literature, and coverage in the field of drug research, pharmacology and pharmaceutics. The database can be searched back to 1974.
ERIC [via U.S. Department of Education]

ERIC [via U.S. Department of Education] is a Web-based digital library of free education-related sources and consists primarily of electronic bibliographic records describing journal and non-journal literature. The collection also includes full-texts of articles and other electronic resources such as audio and video materials.

Multi-disciplinary Databases/platforms

Applied Social Sciences Index & Abstracts
Coverage of literature in social service, health care, psychology and more, includes 16 countries, focusing on the UK.
ProQuest Social Science Premium Collection
ProQuest Social Science Premium Collection contains international literature in social sciences, public policy, sociology, and social work. It includes all the databases listed below. By searching the Premium Collection you lose some advanced filtering capability, but gain the convenience of searching many databases at once.
International Bibliography of the Social Sciences
International Bibliography of the Social Sciences includes bibliographic references to journal articles and to books, reviews and selected chapters dating back to 1951.
Web of Science

Web of Science indexes core journal articles, conference proceedings, data sets, and other resources in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. It also includes access to EndNote Online.
Google Scholar

Note: Follow these instructions to link Google Scholar with Temple's resources.
Google Scholar provides search for scholarly literature. It covers disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations.

Ten Finding Tips

In addition to Library Search and talking with Subject Librarians, use the library research guides (or LibGuides) and databases and resources listed on this page to search and identify journal articles, books, book chapters and other publications in Social Work and related fields.

Use all relevant terms or keywords and, if available, the database controlled vocabulary or indexing and cataloging terms ( thesaurus, subject headings, descriptors) in advanced search. Subject dictionaries, thesauri, and Credo Reference can help identify concepts and words for searching. These guides maybe useful:

Social Work topics keywords prepared by a Washington University librarian.
Examples: Abuse/Domestic Violence; Addiction; Ages; Barriers; Diversity; Homeless; Housing;; Police Violence; Poverty; Social Determinants of Health;
Topics in APA PsycInfo of Relevance to Social Work
APAPsycInfo uses the APA Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms. APA Publishing Training video.
PubMed has Automatic Term Mapping, matching user terms to the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)
Topic-Specific PubMed Queries provide useful MeSH and keywords for select topics, including healthcare disparities, and population health, electronic health records.
Web of Science has "Social Work" as a subject category and micro topics such as Homeless and Intimate Partner Violence. Browse and search meso and micro subjects/ Download the 2024 schema. Download the Micro-topics updates Learn more about topics schema
Subject Headings for Social Work or search the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)
External library guide to subject headings with links to the PDF of LCSH by letter.
Science.gov Topic Pages (Science.gov searches over 60 databases and over 2,200 scientific websites)
Social Determinants of Health, Health Disparities, and Health Equity guide
Look for hedge or filter for systematic or scoping reviews and other evidence synthesis. See for example, PubMed search filters

Search one concept at a time and then combine them using "AND" or "OR". Most databases automatically add "AND" between terms so AND may not be needed.

Parentheses can be used to specify the search order for operators in a search string. If not, for example, in ProQuest and Web of Science, the order is PRE, NEAR, AND, OR, NOT.
Watch Build Better Searches in Web of Science (5 min), to know how to use truncation, operators, parentheses (to set order for operators) and proximity. These functions are similar for other databases.
Be aware that Google operators work differently than those in library databases.

Use database fields and filters, such as Date, Peer-Reviewed, Source Type, and Methodology to focus and narrow your search. This may also be referred to as filtering by using facets.
Check documentation to see which fields are mandatory or required to appear in every record. In APA PsycINFO, for example, the only required fields in every record are title, abstract, author, keywords, publication date, publication type, release date, unique identifier. PubMed check tags appearing in nearly all indexed records include human, animal, male, female, pregnancy, age. These tags are ignored if not mentioned in the article. See also PubMed Special Queries
Geographic location: For library catalogs, use location field and the geographic subject headings. For APA PsycINFO search in geographic location field. For ERIC, there are location, laws, polices and programs and assessment and surveys identifiers.
Use the How to apply methodology filters and Find Empirical and Evidence-Base Articles guides.
EBSCO Database Help Files for meaning of all fields.
Find systematic, scoping, and other evidence synthesis reviews with Cochrane Library, Prospero, PubMed, and Epistomonikas (Searches ten different databases for systematic reviews including the three listed.)
Use database guides, tutorials, search tips, tools, and help to efficiently search, filter, save/download, cite and more.

Main database platform guides: ProQuest, EBSCOhost, CINAHL(EBSCO), Embase, Web of Science, Web of science Help documentation, Web of Science AI enabled topic and keywords search, Gale, ERIC, GovInfo,
PubMed, PubMed publication types; How PubMed Works; Searching when MeSH changes
- The EBSCOhost libguide covers the new platform interface. View ESCOhost new interface video, but note that the default shown is the basic search, whereas the default at Temple is the advanced search.
  Advanced Searching on EBSCOhost.
- ESCOhost new interface quick start guide video
- APA PsycInfo Beginner Search video tutorial; APA PsycInfo Advanced Search
- APA EBSCOhost Quick Reference Guide PDF
For Temple Libraries tutorials and upcoming workshops: Enter the database name or other search term in Library Search and look at results under Library Website.
Use library research guides for courses and subjects to identify relevant databases and resources.
Google Search Tips: List of Operators and Google Search help. Note that some of these operators may no longer work.
This library guide from McGill University has operators and searching tips for many databases
https://libraryguides.mcgill.ca/knowledge-syntheses/search-tips

Follow linkages, such as subject, keyword, author, title or series, organization links and links to Similar Titles, Citations or Cited By, References, and More Like This.

Use tools like Google Scholar and Web of Science Cited Reference Search
Learn more with our Chasing Citation guide and Citation Chasing Video Tutorial

Register/Create account and login to save your search history and create alerts.
Select the Find Full Text links to get the entire source for non-full text indexing databases.
Link Google Scholar to Temple libraries to get full text within our collections.
To save time, save the largest database collection for a vendor, such as ProQuest Social Sciences Premium collection, ProQuest Academic One , which includes ProQuest Central (nearly all disciplines/subjects and different media types) or EBSCOhost Academic Search Complete.

Some database specific advanced filtering capability and thesaurus terms may not be available if you search the larger collection. However, these collection will have a platform wide thesaurus or subject headings, such as the ProQuest Thesaurus.

Use Browzine to browse and read scholarly articles in Social Work journals.
To create an account with the Browzine App, select Temple University and login with your TU AccesNet ID.
Target Core Journals in Social Work and search all relevant databases.