LibGuides: Social Work Resources: Scholarly Journal Articles

Article Databases: Top Picks

Top Picks

Use a library database to find journal articles on your research topic.

Social Services Abstracts
Index to current research focused on social work, human services and related areas including social welfare, social policy and community development. The database abstracts and indexes over 1,500 serials publications and includes abstracts of journal articles and dissertations, and citations to book reviews.
PsycINFO including PsycARTICLES
Contains summaries of the world's journal literature, of dissertations and technical reports, and of English-language chapters and books in psychology and related disciplines. No full text content within PsycInfo, but there are links to full text in other databases, including PsycARTICLES. Also includes psychology articles from related disciplines such as sociology, linguistics, education, medicine, law, physiology, business, psychiatry, and anthropology.

Article Databases: Supplemental Resources

Supplemental Databases

Topics in social work often overlap with complementary areas of inquiry. To that end, it may be useful to search within a multidisiplinary index, or other subject specific indexes. The list below is NOT COMPREHENSIVE and is intended as a starting point to direct you towards indexes that are often relevant to social work topics.

Multidisciplinary databases

EBSCOHost
Search across databases such as Social Work Abstracts, AgeLine, Family and Society Studies Worldwide, Social Science Full Text, etc.
ProQuest (All databases)
A good general purpose index that covers titles in the following areas: Arts, Business, Children, Education, General Interest, Health, Humanities, International, Law, Military, Multicultural, Psychology, Sciences, Social Sciences, and Women's Interests.
Scopus
Find citations for a broad range of scientific literature (including patents) and track, analyze and visualize citations by document, author, zip code, or institution.
Web of Science
A multidisciplinary database, with searchable author abstracts, covering the journal literature of the social sciences. Indexes 1,700 journals spanning 50 disciplines, as well as covering individually selected, relevant items, from over 3,300 of the world's leading scientific and technical journals.

Google Scholar
A free and popular search engine that provides broad coverage of the scholarly literature across many different disciplines. For more information on GS's pros/cons, plus getting MSU access links, scroll to the section of this page about Google Scholar.

General Social Sciences

International Bibliography of the Social Sciences
The comprehensive coverage provided in the database, while based on the core disciplines of anthropology, economics, political science and sociology, also reflects the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of the social sciences. International Bibliography of Social Sciences, from the British Library of Political and Economic Science of the London School of Economics and Political Science, indexes the information contained in over 2,600 social sciences journals and 6,000 books each year. Coverage includes both core and specialized material from over 100 countries in more than 90 languages.
Social Sciences Full Text
Social Sciences Full Text is a bibliographic database that indexes and abstracts articles of at least one column in length from English-language periodicals published in the United States and elsewhere plus the full text of selected periodicals. Coverage includes a wide range of interdisciplinary fields covered in a broad array of social sciences journals.

Business and Labor

ProQuest One Business
ABI/INFORM provides citations with abstracts (since 1971) and some full text of articles (since 1988) appearing in approximately 1,400 international periodicals covering business and management as well as related functional areas including market trends, corporate strategies, and product information.

Criminal Justice

Criminal Justice Database
Formerly called Criminal Justice Periodical Index or CJPI, provides cover-to-cover access for a select group of criminal justice journals frequently consulted by professionals, plus complete abstracts for additional titles. Since Proquest is an aggregator rather than a publisher, embargoes may apply.

Education

ERIC (on ProQuest)
A U.S. national bibliographic database covering the journal and research literature in the field of education. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, ERIC blends two files: Current Index to Journals in Education (CIJE), covering the published journal literature from over 775 periodicals and Resources in Education (RIE), covering other research document literature, such as conference papers, books, theses, and research reports.
Updates related to content and data in ERIC are available via the Education Resources for Research Guide.

Family Studies & Human Ecology

Family & Society Studies Worldwide
Coverage: 1970 - present
Family & Society Studies Worldwide™ (FSSW) is a core resource providing the most comprehensive coverage of research, policy, and practice literature in the fields of Family Science, Human Ecology, Human Development, and Social Welfare. FSSW covers popular issues and meets the requirements of professionals in all fields of social work, social science and family practice. Coverage spans from 1970 to the present, indexing publications from a wide range of social science disciplines including anthropology, sociology, psychology, demography, health sciences, education, economics, law, history and social work.

Gender Studies

Gender Studies Database
Gender Studies Database combines NISC's popular Women's Studies International and Men's Studies databases with the coverage of sexual diversity issues. GSD covers the full spectrum of gender-engaged scholarship inside and outside academia.

Gerontology

AgeLine
AgeLine focuses exclusively on the population aged 50+ and issues of aging. AgeLine is the premier source for the literature of social gerontology and includes aging-related content from the health sciences, psychology, sociology, social work, economics, and public policy. This database indexes over 600 journals, books, book chapters, reports, dissertations, consumer guides, and educational videos. Publication coverage is from 1978 to the present, with selected coverage from 1966-1977.

Law

Gale OneFile: LegalTrac
Access all major law reviews, and specialty law and bar association journals.

Medicine & Nursing

PubMed (Medline)
MEDLINE is the National Library of Medicine's premier bibliographic database covering the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and the preclinical sciences.
CINAHL Plus with Full Text (EBSCO)
CINAHL is the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature. It provides indexing for over 3,000 nursing, allied health, biomedical, and consumer health journals.

Political Science

Political Science Complete
Political Science Complete™ (PSC) contains full text for over 530 journals, and indexing and abstracts for more than 2,900 journals (including top-ranked scholarly journals), many of which are unique to the product. PSC has a worldwide focus, reflecting the globalization of contemporary political discourse. The database also features over 340 full-text reference books and monographs, and over 38,000 full-text conference papers, including those of the International Political Science Association (Description as of January 2012).
Left Index
The Left Index™ is a complete guide to the diverse literature of the left, with an emphasis on political, economic, social and culturally engaged scholarship inside and outside academia. Other topics covered include the labor movement, ecology & environment, race & ethnicity, social & cultural theory, sociology, art & aesthetics, philosophy, history, education, law and globalization. Coverage includes more than 272,000 citations and abstracts (with some full text) and spans from 1982 and earlier to present. Historically significant early Left publications such as The People (est. NY 1891) and The Class Struggle (1931 - 1937) along with classic texts by Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels and others, written in the formative years of the Left are also covered.

Public Policy

PAIS International
Information in PAIS International and PAIS Archive covers topical public and social issues and the making and evaluating of public policy. Worldwide in geographic scope, PAIS International and PAIS Archive indexes publications in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish that deal with public affairs.

Psychology

PsycINFO including PsycARTICLES
Contains summaries of the world's journal literature, of dissertations and technical reports, and of English-language chapters and books in psychology and related disciplines. No full text content within PsycInfo, but there are links to full text in other databases, including PsycARTICLES. Also includes psychology articles from related disciplines such as sociology, linguistics, education, medicine, law, physiology, business, psychiatry, and anthropology.

Sociology

Sociological Abstracts
Sociological Abstracts abstracts and indexes the international literature in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. The database provides abstracts of journal articles and citations to book reviews drawn from over 1,800+ serials publications, and also provides abstracts of books, book chapters, dissertations, and conference papers. Coverage is for articles published from 1952-present.

Urban Studies

Urban Studies Abstracts
Urban Studies Abstracts includes bibliographic records related to urban studies, including urban affairs, community development, urban history, and other areas of relevance to the discipline. The index contains more than 45,000 records, selected from both scholarly journals and book chapters within the discipline. This online database indexes the full backrun of the former paper abstract "Sage Urban Studies Abstracts", taking coverage back to 1972.

Google Scholar

Advantages:

Google Scholar is a free and popular database that provides a broad coverage of the scholarly literature across many different disciplines and sources. It includes legal journals and also picks up "gray literature" (documents that are not formally published such as conference posters, white papers, manuscripts posted on faculty websites, etc.).

Disadvantages:

Google Scholar is not always the best database to choose when searching for journal articles and it should never be the only database that use for your research project. It does not index all available resources and lacks many advanced search options found in library databases. Be sure to use library indexes specifically built for your subject area in addition to searching Google Scholar.

Connect to MSU subscription resources in Google Scholar

To ensure seamless access to MSU subscription resources, e.g. journal articles, from your home computer, do the following:

Go to scholar.google.com
Before searching, click on "Settings" in the upper-right corner
Click on "Library Links"
Search for Michigan State University
Select "Michigan State University – MSU Access" by checking the box
Click "Save"
Do your search in Google Scholar
Click on the link for "MSU Access" that will appear to the right of the title of the resource
You will then be prompted for your MSU NetID and password to access that resource

Please note: if you click on the title and not the "MSU Access" link you will not be recognized as an MSU subscriber.
Remember that in most cases you should not have to pay for access to a journal article. Please ask a librarian if you are not able to get access to a desired resource.