Research Guides: #Social Work: Databases

Before You Research

Scholarly articles are not the place to start your research. First, you need to get familiar enough with your topic that you can start to narrow it down, and for that you need more general information. This will help you develop context for your topic as well as get to know the specialized terms used by experts.

Credo Reference This link opens in a new window
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Useful when you're starting out on a research project. Do simple searches to find topic introductions in a variety of subjects. The mind map tool will help you discover related ideas and terms.

Journals & Periodicals: Identifying Scholarly Sources
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This guide introduces scholarly content and how it differs from popular and trade information.

LSC Databases

Gale in Context: Opposing Viewpoints This link opens in a new window
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Provides topic overviews as well as collects a variety of sources, including statistics, reference materials, journal articles, news articles, images, and audio broadcasts.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
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Complete historical full text of all issues of peer-reviewed journals in a wide range of humanities and social science fields. (pronounced jay-store)
Military & Government Collection (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
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Full-text journal articles and magazines on military and political topics, plus books, reports, government documents, etc.
Newspaper Source Plus (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
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Selected full-text from 30 US national and international newspapers and 200 regional papers, plus TV & radio news transcripts.
Project MUSE This link opens in a new window
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Full text of 285 journals in literature, history, international/cultural studies, and other fields within the humanities and social sciences.

Open Access Social Work & Related Databases

Open Access refers to journal and scholarly information freely available on the Internet. There are various levels of open access available. For example, material may be made available without copyright or licensing restrictions.

BioMed Central Journals
BioMed Central is an open access publisher of over 200 free online academic journals specializing in subjects related to science, technology and medicine. Areas of interest to social workers include public health, substance abuse, Alzheimer's research and health care policy.
Directory of Open Access Journals
From the website: "DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals."
EBP - Evidence Based Practice Databases
Open access social work database and resources for EBP from Simmons University.
National Academies Press
All books published by the National Academies Press can be downloaded as PDFs for free by registering for a free account. Browse topics like aging, children, youth & families, policy, reviews and evaluations, population and fertility studies, women and minorities.
Open Access Social Work
This guide has been created to assist PSU (Portland State University) School of Social Work alumni and other practicing social workers in accessing scholarly research after they have left their university.
Open CRS - Congressional Research Service Reports
Reports written by the Congressional Research Service in order to keep members of Congress and their staff up to date on a number of important policy and government issues.
SocARXiv
Open archive of the social sciences, provides a free, non-profit, open access platform for social scientists to upload working papers, preprints, and published papers, with the option to link data and code.
Springer Open
Search within over 160 peer-reviewed open access journals and some open access books. Most journals are in the medicine and science but there are some articles covering the social sciences.
SSRN - Social Science Research Network
This site acts as a repository for scholars in social sciences fields to share their research. Authors may upload and share their papers for no charge and papers are free or very low cost to download.