UCF Research Guides: Social Work: Databases & Selected Journals

Best Bets

APA PsycInfo (EBSCOhost) (1887+)
American Psychological Association's (APA) renowned resource for abstracts of scholarly journal articles, book chapters, books, and dissertations, is the largest resource devoted to peer-reviewed literature in behavioral science and mental health.
"contains approximately 3 million citations and summaries dating as far back as the 1600s with DOIs for over 1.4 million records. Ninety-eight percent of the covered material is peer-reviewed. The database also includes information about the psychological aspects of related fields such as medicine, psychiatry, nursing, sociology, education, pharmacology, technology, linguistics, anthropology, business, law and others. Journal coverage, which spans from the1800s to present, includes international material selected from around 2,500 periodicals in dozens of languages."
Psychological Abstracts:
* 1927-1947 Microfilm BF1.P65
* 1948-2004 print in remote storage
Social Services Abstracts (ProQuest) (1979+)
Research focused on social work, human services, and related areas, including social welfare, social policy, and community development.
Social Work Abstracts (EBSCOhost) (1965+)
offers extensive coverage of more than 450 social work and human services journals dating back to 1965. Produced by the National Association of Social Workers (NASW), the database provides citations and abstracts dealing with all aspects of the social work field, including theory and practice, areas of service and social issues and problems such as homelessness, child and family welfare, and aging.
Sociological Abstracts (ProQuest) (1952+)
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Sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. Includes information from an international selection of over 2,600 journals and other serials publications, plus conference papers, books, and dissertations.

Best Databases for Tests & Measurements

Mental Measurements Yearbook with Tests in Print (EBSCOhost) (1985+)
Information about and reviews of English-language standardized tests covering educational skills, personality, vocational aptitude, psychology, and related areas.
Health and Psychosocial Instruments (HaPI) (1985+)
Information about behavioral measurement instruments, such as checklists, coding schemes, indexes, interview schedules, projective techniques, questionnaires, rating scales, surveys, tasks, tests, and vignettes/scenarios.

Health and Psychosocial Instruments (HaPI) provides information about behavioral measurement tools used across diverse professions and disciplines, including medicine, nursing, public health, psychology, social work, sociology, communication, and organizational behavior. HaPI helps researchers, students, and clinicians locate questionnaires, interviews, and other tests relevant to their investigations, theses, dissertations, and grant proposals and helps researchers to enhance the quality, reliability, and validity of their measurement techniques.

Additional Social Work Databases

Abstracts in Social Gerontology (EBSCOhost)
Indexes social gerontology journals, including the psychology of aging, elder abuse, society and the elderly.
CINAHL Plus with Full Text (EBSCOhost) (1937+)
Cumulative Index to Nursing & Allied Health Literature. Indexes nursing, allied health, biomedical, and consumer health journals.
Cochrane Library (Wiley)
The Cochrane Library is a collection of databases that contain different types of high-quality, independent evidence to inform healthcare decision-making.

Database of Abstracts of Review of Effects (DARE), Health Technology Assessments, and National Health Service Economic Evaluation have been retired because much of the content is freely available on other websites, such as the CRD database website.
UCF subscribes to Cochrane Library on the Wiley platform as of March 2021.
PAIS Index (ProQuest) (1915+)
contains references to more than 553,300 journal articles, books, government documents, statistical directories, grey literature, research reports, conference reports, publications of international agencies, microfiche, Internet material, & more.
The print index provides coverage for 1915-1974 - Main Library Reference H1.P8
"PAIS (originally, the Public Affairs Information Service) was established in 1914. There are two databases created from the files: PAIS International and PAIS Archive. PAIS International includes records from the print PAIS Bulletin 1977 and forward; it also includes PAIS print Foreign Language Index published 1972-1990, at which time it merged with the PAIS Bulletin.
The PAIS International database contains continually updated records for over half a million journal articles, books, government documents, statistical directories, grey literature, research reports, conference papers, web content, and more. Newspapers and newsletters are not indexed. PAIS International includes publications from over 120 countries throughout the world. In addition to English, some of the indexed materials are published in French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and other languages. It is updated quarterly with over 17,000 current records added in total each year.
PAIS Archive is a retrospective conversion of the PAIS Annual Cumulated Bulletin, volumes 1-62, published 1915-1976. PAIS Archive contains over 1.23 million records and covers monographs, periodical articles, notes and announcements, and analytics. The original, historical subject headings have been retained. PAIS Archive provides a unique perspective on the 20th century’s most important public and social policies, such as Prohibition, suffrage, pacifism, civil rights, McCarthyism, Vietnam War, and Watergate."
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global (1637+)
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"Each dissertation published since July, 1980 includes a 350-word abstract written by the author. Master's theses published since 1988 include 150-word abstracts. Simple bibliographic citations are available for dissertations dating from 1637. Where available, PQDTGlobal provides 24-page previews of dissertations and theses."
For abstracts from 1938-1980 see the print volumes of Dissertation Abstracts International
"ProQuest Dissertations and Theses: Global (PQDTGlobal) is the world's most comprehensive collection of full-text dissertations and theses. As the official digital dissertations archive for the Library of Congress and as the database of record for graduate research, PQDTGlobal includes millions of searchable citations to dissertations and theses from 1861 to the present day together with over a million full-text dissertations that are available for download in PDF format. Over 2.1 million titles are available for purchase as printed copies. The database offers full text for most of the dissertations added since 1997 and strong retrospective full-text coverage for older graduate works. It also includes PQDT UK & Ireland content."
PTSDpubs (ProQuest) (1871+)
includes citations to all literature on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental-health sequelae of traumatic events, without disciplinary, linguistic, or geographical limitations, and to offer both current and retrospective coverage
The PILOTS bibliographic database is produced at the headquarters of the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in White River Junction, Vermont. The PILOTS database is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
PubMed (MEDLINE) (1948+)
PubMed® comprises more than 30 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.

To authenticate for full-text off-campus, log in
PubMed citations and abstracts include the fields of biomedicine and health, covering portions of the life sciences, behavioral sciences, chemical sciences, and bioengineering. PubMed also provides access to additional relevant web sites and links to the other NCBI molecular biology resources.
PubMed is a free resource that is developed and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), located at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Publishers of journals can submit their citations to NCBI and then provide access to the full-text of articles at journal web sites using LinkOut."
Science Direct (1997+)
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Full text scientific, technical and medical research journals, eBooks, Reference works, handbooks and book series published by Elsevier.
Social Science Database (ProQuest)
"ProQuest Social Science Journals is a definitive resource for those who need access to a variety of scientific journals. The database includes over 1000 titles, with the majority available in full text. It covers core disciplines across the social sciences including sociology, social work, anthropology, politics and other areas, featuring journals from over 50 countries, facilitating multidisciplinary research and providing researchers with a variety of perspectives."
Subject coverage:
- Anthropology
- Communication science
- Criminology
- Demography
- Economics
- Education
- Political science
- Policy studies
- Psychology
- Social work
- Sociology
Social Sciences & Humanities (SAGE Journals)
Browse journals by discipline: Anthropology & Archaeology; Communication & Media Studies; Criminology & Criminal Justice; Cultural Studies; Economics & Development; Education; Ethnic Studies; Family Studies; Gender Studies; Geography; Gerontology & Aging; Group Studies; History; Information Science; Interpersonal Violence; Language & Linguistics; Law; Management & Organization Studies; Marketing & Hospitality; Peace Studies & Conflict Resolution; Philosophy; Politics & International Relations; Psychoanalysis; Psychology & Counseling; Public Administration; Regional Studies; Research Methods & Evaluation; Science & Society Studies; Social Work & Social Policy; Sociology; Special Education; Theology & Biblical Studies; Urban Studies & Planning
Sociology Database (ProQuest)
"ProQuest Sociology covers the international literature of sociology and social work, including culture and social structure, history and theory of sociology, social psychology, substance abuse and addiction and more. This collection provides full-text coverage of many core titles indexed in Sociological Abstracts and Social Services Abstracts. As well as hundreds of full text scholarly journals, the database also includes over 500 recent full-text doctoral dissertations on sociology."
Subject coverage:
- Community and mental health services
- Crisis intervention
- The family and social welfare
- Gerontology
- Poverty and homelessness
- Professional issues in social work
- Social services in addiction
- Social work education
- Social work practice
- Violence, abuse, neglect
Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics)
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Provides citation indexing of top high-impact journals with powerful tools such as cited reference searching and Author Finder, 256 categories thoroughly cover the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities.
Citation Indexes for finding articles that cite a given author or citation.
- Science Citation Index Expanded (1965+)
- Social Sciences Citation Index (1965+)
- Arts & Humanities Citation Index (1975+)

Citation Connection is now available. This includes:
- Data Citation Index (1900+)
- Derwent Innovations Index – Patents Database (1963+)
- Book Citation Index: Scholarly Books (2005+)
- Conference Proceedings Citation Index (1990+)
- Index Chemicus (IC) (1989+)
- Current Chemical Reactions (1993+)
- Current Contents Connect (1998+)

Selected Journals

Search Tips

Boolean Operators

AND
Example: anxiety AND children
OR
abandonment OR separation
NOT
anxiety NOT adult

Modifiers and Truncation

Use quotes for exact phrases.
Example: "attachment theory"
Use parentheses to group terms.
("attachment theory" AND "separation anxiety")
Use the asterisk for branching terms. This finds any words that starts with the stem term.
Example: child* (includes child OR children OR childhood)

Building a Search Query

Example search using Boolean operators, quotes, parentheses, and wildcard:
"attachment theory" AND child* AND (abandonment OR "separation anxiety")