Home - RSSW 785 Mental Health Policy: Resources - Library Guides at University at Albany

Getting Started

Before you start doing in-depth research on a mental health policy topic, you may wish to consult some general works that will provide an overview or a "lay of the land" on your topic. Good background sources include:

UAlbany only resource Encyclopedia of Social Work: available online and in print: DEWEY REF HV 12 E53 2008

Comprehensive Handbook of Social Work and Social Welfare: volume 4 is about social policy: DEWEY REF HV 40 C635 2008

CQ Researcher Plus: provides "plain english" overviews of important Federal legislation. Online and in print: DEWEY REF JK 1 C66

Resources in Social Welfare: UA Libraries' subject guide on Social Welfare

Students may also wish to take the Resources in Federal Public Policy workshop: register online.

Introduction

Researching policy requires multidisciplinary research. In addition to the basic social welfare literature, one needs to include sources which present statistical data, factual information, reports on research, legislative or legal information, agency-based reports, position papers, etc., as well as professional journal articles and books. Typically, a combination of sources are required for a complete gathering of various perspectives related to a certain mental health issue.

Searching Basics

Basic Concepts

Understanding these basic concepts will help you navigate in most library databases, including the library catalog.

Choosing a database- Choose a database based on your topic. Look at these elements:
- focus of the database (topical such as social work, public policy, medical)
- specific populations involved (elderly, homeless, specific ethnic groups)
- kind of information needed (current news, legislation, statistics, agency regulations, etc.)
Controlled vocabulary- Most databases have a "controlled vocabulary" for their subject headings/descriptors that are assigned to each record in the database. Always look at your subject headings/descriptors. These are words that may help you with your search. For example, use the Thesaurus of Sociological Indexing Terms (Dewey REF Z 695.1 S63 B66 1996) for valid subject terms in Social Work Abstracts or in Sociological Abstracts.
Keyword searching- This is one method to try if you are not sure of the "controlled vocabulary" or official subject headings because:
- keyword searching will search your terms in the title, abstract, author, subjects/descriptor and other content-rich fields of the record
- keywords can be combined with connectors (and, or, not)
Connectors- are words that allow you to join two or more words together to get more precise results:

Connector	Result	Use
welfare and teenagers	Will retrieve all records that have all words (welfare and teenagers) in them.	Used to narrow your search. Will always result in less records.
adolescents or teenagers	Will retrieve all records that have either adolescents or teenagers in them.	Used most frequently to search for words that are synonyms.
welfare and teenagers not "family planning"	Will retrieve all records with welfare and teenagers but will take out any records with "family planning" in them.	Used to take out words that are irrelevant to your search.

Narrowing your search- If you are getting too many resulting citations, try making your search more specific. For example if you are interested in research done with the elderly, but are getting too many citations, try narrowing your population to frail elderly, disabled elderly, Chinese elderly, etc. Try narrowing your topic to specific groups, such as prisoners, homeless women, etc.