Guides & Bibliographies

Social Work Abstracts

Introduction

Social Work Abstracts is produced by the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) since 1965, and contains citations are from more than 50,000 articles found in more than 400 social work and social service related journals and hundreds of social work dissertations. Many topics are covered, such as, homelessness, AIDS, child & family welfare, aging, substance abuse, legislation, community organization, child abuse & neglect, counseling & treatment therapies, and more.

Social Work Abstracts is available to current UT Arlington faculty and students at this web addresses:

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

Searching

A truncation symbol in Social Work 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 HOMELESS* will search for both the word HOMELESS and the word HOMELESSNESS.

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:

(HOMELESS* OR RUNAWAY*) AND (PROGRAM* OR POLIC*)

The first part of this statement will find material about the homeless or homelessness or runaways. The second part will look for the words "program" or "programs" or "policy" or "policies". The AND links the two sets together. This might be an effective way to look for information about programs or policies for the homeless and runaway population.

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