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Social Work

Welcome to the Georgia State University subject guide for Social Work! Here you can find pointers for identifying high-quality information for your research (as well as how to cite it correctly).

Peer Review

You will  need to use scholarly peer-reviewed journals for your research papers and projects.  Peer-reviewed journals  (also called refereed journals) include articles that have been analyzed by scholars with expertise in the specific topics covered by the articles.  Generally, recommendations for revision are made before articles are published.  Therefore, you can be assured that articles available in peer-reviewed journals are of sufficiently high quality to integrate into your papers.  A chart giving criteria for distinguishing scholarly journals from trade and popular magazines is linked above. 

PsycINFO's APA Thesaurus

Social Work Databases

Finding the Article Text

Article databases sometimes include the full article, and sometimes only have the citation that tells you when and where the article was published.

Often, if the article text isn't included along with the citation, you'll see this Find It @GSU button instead.  Click the button to get a list of possible online sources for the article you want.  You may get several links if we have the article on more than one site.

If we don't have the article online, search GIL Find for the journal title, just like you'd search for the title of a book. (Note: that's the journal title, not the article title.)

Science journals are on Library South 3rd floor, recent non-science journals are on Library North 1st floor, and older non-science journals are on Library North 3rd floor.

Ask a librarian for help if you can't find what you need!