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Annotated Bibliographies in Social Welfare

Library guide to help with SSW 620 classwork and assignments.

Social Welfare Databases

Search for scholarly research articles, book chapters, reports and more by using the library databases.

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.