Social Work Reference Center (SWRC)

As an EBSCO product, Social Work Reference Center shares many of the same search functionality as the EBSCOHost research databases, such as boolean and phrase searching.

Those looking for more advanced search strategies should consult the guide on EBSCOHost research databases. In general though, advanced search strategies are often not necessary when using Social Work Reference Center. This is because Social Work Reference Center contains considerably less content than the EBSCOHost research databases (compare approximately 3,000 full-text resources with over a million full-text resources).

With that in mind, this page provides a few basic tips to help you with your searching.

Social Work Reference Center supports advanced searches using searchable fields.

These fields assist you in creating a more targeted search, however, not all of these fields will prove useful. For example, there are no abstracts available for many of the resources in Social Work Reference Center; consequently, an abstract search will rarely return any relevant results.

In most cases the best fields to use in a search will be title, subject, and publication type. Note that you do not need to specify a field in order to perform a regular keyword search.

A more useful feature of the Advanced Search menu is the ability to limit your results by Publication Type (i.e. quick lessons, evidence-based care sheets, etc.).

It's also possible to limit your results after you have already searched. To do so, select or deselect the options presented under Source Types in the left sidebar menu appearing beside your search results.

There is some information available from the record page for each resource that may be helpful when searching and browsing on Social Work Refereence Center. To access the record page, you need to click on Detailed Record. 

From the detailed record page you can view subject headings that describe the topics or subjects of the resource. Click on a subject heading to see more resources on the same subject. 

Finally, one last feature that might be of interest from the detailed record page is the content listed under Related Information. Click on the links in this sidebar box to find content related to the current resource.