Guides & Bibliographies

Social Services Abstracts

Introduction

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. The database abstracts and indexes over 1,600 serials publications and includes abstracts of journal articles and dissertations, and citations to book reviews. Social Services Abstracts is updated monthly, and contains more than 80,000 records.

Social Services Abstracts is available to current UT Arlington faculty & students at this webaddresses:

eresource.uta.edu/cgi-bin/db-socioservcsa.cgi

Searching

A truncation symbol in Social Services Abstracts is an asterisk (*), and when this symbol is put at the end of a word, the database will be searched for all of the possible endings--suffixes--for that word. For example, the command abus* will search for both the word abuse, abused, and abusing.

Two Boolean operators that are important in finding information are AND and OR. The AND is used to connect two different concepts and the OR is used between concepts that are synonymous. It is critical to put parentheses around a search expression that contains an OR. Here is an example:

(child* or adoles* or teen* or juven*) and (policy or policies)

The first part of this statement will find material about children or adolescents, teens or juveniles. The second part will look for the words "policy" or "policies". The AND then links the first set with the second. This should be an effective way to look for polices dealing with children's issues.

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