Social Work and Social Care

It's really important in the social work and social care field to use high quality, up to date evidence to support your academic work and your professional practice, so that you can produce strong academic work and informed professional practice. Recent expert research tends to be published as articles in academic journals. These articles usually cannot be found by a search engine like Google, but are indexed in specialist databases. 

Academic databases allow you to find published articles about a particular topic. Searching a range of academic databases allows you to be more targeted in your search and find more of the relevant literature compared to only searching in Library Search. The Library provides these databases in collaboration with your lecturers and academic staff, helping you find the most appropriate materials for your subject area.

To search the literature in a comprehensive and structured way, you should use the databases that are relevant to your subject. The links to the most relevant databases for Nursing and Midwifery research are linked on this page.

Support with database searching

Remember to click 'Check SHU Links' for each reference located in an academic database, particularly when there isn't a PDF link.  For more information about how to use databases effectively, see the 'Finding the Literature' page in this subject guide. The library also offers support with literature searching (more information about library support here).

The databases below specialise in searching for journal articles on social work, social care and community studies.

What to do if the Library does not have the information you need.

If we don't have a journal article, book or conference proceeding in stock, you can request the information using the free Document Supply Service. While it may not be possible to get absolutely everything, the vast majority of articles can be obtained this way. 

The databases below search a broad range of subjects, including social work, social care and community studies.

If you are looking at a topic related to mental or physical health, you may find it useful to search a medical / healthcare database: 

It is important to scan the contents of key journals in your subject area on a regular basis to keep up to date with news and developments.  

To help get you started with exploring the literature, here is a list of journals within social work and social care:

It is important to scan key journals in your subject area to keep up to date. The Articles in Press feature displays the most current articles before they have been officially given a volume and issue number. When you have selected a journal, Articles in Press appears on the left, just below the journal cover image.

In the course of searching these specialist resources, you may find articles that we do not have access to in our Library collection. If this happens, we can get the articles for you through our Document Supply Service.

This link is the information about how to use the Document Supply Service at Sheffield Hallam.

• Document Supply Service