SW 214 Out of Home Care and Permanency Planning: Find Social Work Articles

This Library Guide is meant as a complement to SW 214 Out of Home Care and Permanency Planning, and will provide various tools and resources to help students in their studies and assignments.

If you've started your research by looking for library resources in our One Search online library catalog, you can often use the subjects you've found to begin research in the article databases at A to Z Databases.  In the example below, 'family violence'  was entered as a subject search. This example uses the database SocINDEX:

Often, you will get too many results to go through (300+ are probably too many), so you can modify your search to retrieve fewer, more specific results. In the example above, the search retrieved over 8,500 results; you will want to reduce those numbers. To narrow your results list, try something like this:

Additional terms were used in the second box to narrow the results to only those articles that have to do with legislation. This still gave too many results (2,500+), so try adding a term in the third search box, which narrowed it down to approximately 130. The final search lists articles on family violence that have to do with legislation in the state of California (family violence AND legislation AND California).

Search Tips:

• Use one concept per search box - most of the time, you'll only need to use 1 or 2 search boxes
• Connect synonyms and related terms with the word, 'OR'
• Start simply, and add additional terms or limits only if you need them 
• Keep your search terms to only 1 or 2 words, if possible
• Use an asterisk to get word variations - your results will have words that start with the letters before the asterisk (i.e. legislat* will retrieve results with the terms legislate, legislates, legislation, etc.)
• Instead of adding more terms to your search to narrow the number of results, try some of the limits, such as date of publication, scholarly/peer-reviewed articles only, language, etc.