Social Work - West campus  Tags: social_work immigration refugees  

Once you have identified a research topic for your literature review, an important first step is identifying the various search tools you will use to conduct a thorough review of the published literature (print and online).

As far as journal articles are concerned, in general, I recommend searching Academic Search Premier, Social Service Abstracts, and PsycINFO.

For additional recommended journal indexes see this guide's Article Databases tab.

Also consider using the sources listed under the Books tab.

Learning Citations
    APA Style

Cite Sources with RefWorks

Using "Get It! @ ASU" for Locating Full-Text Articles

Using Research Databases

Using Academic Search Premier

Using Google Scholar

1) Pre-plan. Identify what you know and don't know about the topic.

2) Consider reading an overview article from a specialized social work encyclopedia (see the E-Books page.)

3) Write-out synonyms and related terms for your keywords. Consult the database's alphabetical subject terms list or thesaurus to learn the terminology used by the database indexers.

4) Pay particular attention to an article's abstract. The abstract is generally a 75-150 word summary of the article's purpose, methodologies and findings.

5) Keep a research search log to document which databases you have searched and what search strategies you have used in searching. Most of the database keep a running list of your searches, so prior to exiting the datatabse either print-out or copy and paste these searches into your log.

6) Use RefWorks to store the various citations you come across.

7) Use personal folders in RefWorks to categorize citations (useful, dated, rejected, etc.).

8) Review the references list of articles you read - especially those articles that you consider to be especially relevant.

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