SW 320U Introduction to Child Welfare: Find Research Articles
Strategies for Finding Research
You have a couple ways that you can search for research articles:
- Go to known child welfare related journals and search or browse the issues for articles.
- Search a database on your topic, retrieving results from any of the journals the database tracks.
Lists of recommended journals and recommended databases are below. Explore both paths and see which works best for you!
Recommended Journals
Go to the catalog record for the journal, then click on the "Online Access" link. This will provide an access link to the full text journal.
Once on the journal/publisher website, look for a search box for the journal, or you can go to different issues of the journal to browse articles. The screenshot below is an example of a journal website with these options highlighted.
Recommended Scholarly Databases
- PsycINFOMaintains citations and abstracts for journal articles, books, and dissertations in psychology about human behavior from 1879 to the present. Nearly 2500 journals are indexed in PsycINFO, and the database is updated weekly.
- Social Services AbstractsIncludes citations of journal articles, dissertations, and conference proceedings focused on social work, human services, social welfare, social policy, and community development.
- Google Scholar
This link opens in a new window
Google Scholar searches the academic, scholarly Web for peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles. Searching Google Scholar from the Portland State University Library will identify full text articles available from PSU Library resources as well as open access articles from other universities and colleges.
Search Tips for PsycINFO
Construct your search using the keywords or terms relevant to your topic.
- Quotation marks can be used to search for phrases (e.g. "social cognition")
- Use OR to search both keywords/phrases
- Truncation searches for variants of a word. Use an asterik (*) at the root (e.g. psych* searches for psychology, psychologist, psychological, psychosocial)
The following will search for "Child Development" AND ("Domestic Violence" OR "Family Violence")
Before or after performing your search, you can further limits your results to Peer Reviewed Journals and Publication Date.
Using the "Record Type". Selecting "Peer Reviewed Journal" will update your results to be only research articles from peer reviewed journals.
Easily limit to the desired publication date range using the publication date option.
Quick Keyword Searching in Social Services Abstracts
This very short tutorial from Humboldt State Library demonstrates performing a keyword search in Social Services Abstracts.