Search Indexes and Databases to find journal articles to find citations, abstracts and/or full text articles, reports and other resources on your topic. Both scholarly and popular articles may be included. Search the Social Work databases if your topic is related to social work. If your topic covers multiple disciplines, look at the GENERAL DATABASES and OTHER DATABASES for other popular social work databases.
Contains information on the fields of social work and human services from 1977 to present. The database provides exceptional coverage of over 500 journals in all areas of the profession, including theory and practice, areas of service, social issues, and social problems.
To help determine if the article is scholarly ask yourself the following questions:
Academic scholarly articles are written by scholars or researchers with expertise in the field and are designed to share the results of original research or thought with the academic community. Read the Finding Journal Articles guide for more tips on evaluating sources and to help determine if a journal is PEER-REVIEWED.
When searching online, various words are used to help broaden or narrow your search. Here are a few tips you should know before searching any academic database:
Boolean operators: Most internet and electronic databases follow the rules of boolean logic. Boolean logic refers to the relationships (connections or differences) between different search terms. The most common boolean operators are:
AND - used to narrow a search and establish more relevant results by linking keywords together (e.g. "behavioural" AND "psychology").
OR - broadens a search and get more results. Typically used for synonyms and words with variant spellings (e.g. "self-actualization" OR "self-identity").
NOT - use to narrow a search and get more relevant results (e.g. "behaviouralism" NOT "humanism").
Truncation: used to find similar words with different endings
e.g. human* searches "human" and "humans"
e.g. educat* searches "education", "educate", "educational" etc
asterisk (*) searches for various different endings of a word in most databases (including York University), however LexisNexis uses an exlamation mark (!).
Advanced Search - this option is available on most databases, and allows you to specialize your search based on documents (books, articles, video etc), date, geographic location, language, etc.
Quotation Marks - using quotation marks will allow you to search for exact phrases. For example, searching "mental impairment" will only retreive searches with both "mental" and "impairment" together in that order.
Refine Search - many online databases allow you to specify your search criteria after selecting your keywords and clicking on search.
Finding a Specific Journal - if you know the name of the journal you are looking for, type it in the library catalogue, then select "Periodical Title", then hit "go".