Skip to Main Content

Social Welfare Research Toolkit: MORE

Resources for research in Social Welfare.

Evidence Based Practice

Evidence Based Practice, to quote Professor Gambrill, is "a new educational and practice paradigm for closing the gaps between research and practice to maximize opportunities to help clients and avoid harm.”

Finding Tests & Measures

APA Handbook of Testing and Measurement in Psychology

eBooks and books with full-text scales:

Online searchable sites with full-text scales:

 

Nexis Uni Tips

  1. Use truncation (wildcard) to search different forms of the word (child* retrieves child, child's, children)
  2. Use 'proximity connectors' -- w/[number], for example (youth or adolescent or teen*) w/25 homeless*. (You can also use w/s for within sentence, or w/p for within paragraph but you can't also combine these with the number of words.)

Forward Citations

If an article is relevant to your topic, you want to look at the research it cited (backward citation). But it can also be very helpful to see who has cited it (forward citation). There are several different ways to do this, and the results will overlap --  no single method is comprehensive.

Google Scholar provides forward citations for some articles. It has a broader range of documents included (not just peer reviewed journals, but reports, pre-prints, etc.) and doesn't eliminate self citation or de-duplicate the results.

Web of Science is a vast, multidisciplinary database, which includes the Social Science Citation Index. This index allows you to do a "Cited Reference" search if you select that tab. This will retrieve other articles (from a prestigious list of peer reviewed journals) which have cited the target article, and it also shows the references for the the original article... both forward and backward citation.

Search Tips

Power search features for most article databases:
  • Use synonyms -- there are many ways to express a concept (teenager or teenagers or adolescent)
  • Use truncation to get different forms of the word, for example teenage* will retrieve teenagers, teenager, teenaged, etc.
  • Use quotation marks when you want an "exact phrase"
  • Restrict by date -- most will let you find only the most current five years if you chose that limit.
  • Use "controlled vocabulary" (also called descriptors or subject headings) if the database has them. The PsycInfo Thesaurus is a very powerful tool. It helps you identify articles that are about a topic, not just that have the word in the abstract. For example, if you are looking for the cause of a certain psychological problem, the descriptor "etiology" finds material that looks at causality.
  • Use the special "limits" or "fields" that the database offers. They really do help you make a more focused and powerful search. PsycInfo lets you use many helpful limits including:
    • Methodology-- are you interested in literature reviews? Empirical studies? Clinical trials? Quantitative or qualitative studies?
    • Population -- do you want research based on humans? Males vs. females?
    • Age of subjects -- adolescents? children? old people?
    • Publication type -- do you want articles? dissertations? books?