Ask Us / Meet with Us
Search Tips
Boolean operators connect your search terms in order to narrow or widen your search results from a database. The three main operators are AND, OR, and NOT.
- AND includes other terms and widens your results.
- Ex: houselessness AND mental health
- OR connects multiple terms and broadens your results.
- Ex: houselessness OR homelessness
- NOT excludes certain words and narrows your results.
- Ex: houselessness NOT youth
Quotes and asterisks are other helpful tools that you can use when using databases.
- Quotes around a certain phrase tells the database to search those two words together and in a specific order.
- Ex: if you wanted to research LGBTQ youth, you might search "LGBTQ youth" in order to avoid results that only mention "LGBTQ" or "youth".
- Asterisks are used in truncation, a technique that broadens your search to include various word endings and spellings. An asterisk is placed at the end of the root of the word you are searching.
- Ex: searching "child*" would give you results that contain the terms child, childs, children, childrens, or childhood.
-
How-to search with the APA Thesaurus and Subjects In this video, you’ll learn how to create an effective search in APA PsycInfo using Thesaurus Terms. We’ll use the APA Thesaurus to look up DE Subjects and conduct a search in APA PsycInfo.
-
How-to find Peer-Reviewed Empirical Articles By the end of this video you will be able to: Use the filters in APA PsycInfo to access empirical studies from peer-reviewed journals. Determine if an article found in APA PsycInfo is an empirical study from a peer-reviewed journal.
Liberatory and Decolonial Social Work Research
-
Articles on Liberatory Frameworks and Decolonial Approaches in Social Work Practice and ResearchThis is a working bibliography of recent scholarly literature on Liberatory Frameworks and Decolonial Approaches in Social Work Practice and Research.
Resources for Conducting Research
-
Encyclopedia of Social Work (4 vols.)
Browse to find an overview & some references on topics such as Cross-Cultural Measurement in Social Work Research and Evaluation and Community-Based Participatory Research.
Several new articles address Race, Ethnicity & Culture
Websites
-
The Cite Black Women Podcast "Bi-weekly podcast features reflections and conversations about the politics and praxis of acknowledging and centering Black women’s ideas and intellectual contributions inside and outside of the academy through citation."
-
Conducting research through an anti-racism lens An extensive library guide lists steps to take, resources to explore, organizations and sources for research.
-
A Toolkit for Centering Racial Equity Within Data Integration By Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy (June 2020, downloadable pdf)