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Social Work

Find books, article databases, and trusted websites to explore and research all aspects of social work.

About PsycINFO

PsycINFO has several powerful features to help you find relevant articles, book chapters, and dissertations for your assignments.

These include:
  • Refining Search Results
  • Limiters
  • The Thesaurus

These features are explained more fully below. 

Start your research early!
  • PscyINFO has little to no online full text. You will not be able to read an article immediately.
  • Use the Find It! button to see if we have the full text of the article in another database, or to order it.
  • Ordering is free and easy. An ordered article may arrive in 1-2 days, but sometimes takes 5-7 days or more. Plan ahead.

Refining a Basic Search

Getting started:

  • Do basic searching by adding keywords to the boxes, with one concept per box.
  • After your initial search, use the Refine Results options on the left to get better results.

For example, searching for gender gives you nearly 200,000 hits, most of which happen to mention gender but don't actually focus on it.


On the left you can narrow these results by subject — what you really want, and what the articles will actually be about.

Human Sex Differences may be closest to what you're looking for, so click on it.

This gives you new results, as well as more subjects to choose from. If you click on Stereotyped Attitudes from the next list, you end up with 875 focused results.


Keep in mind that Human Sex Differences is still part of your search.

If you're more interested in just Stereotyped Behavior, click the small X next to Human Sex Differences to remove it (this is in the upper left corner of the results list). Your results increase to over 2,000.

Using Limiters

On the Advanced Search page, you can specify your search in several useful ways:

  • Methodologies: Find studies using specific kinds of methodologies, including quantitative and qualitative.

  • Age Groups: Search for studies on particular age groups. Choose multiple groups by holding down CTRL and clicking.

  • Research Subjects: Find items that have human, animal, male, female, inpatient, or outpatient research subjects.

Other helpful limiters include:

  • Language (to get results only in English)
  • Date
  • Publication Type
  • Document Type
The "Linked Full Text" Option
Screenshot of
  • DO NOT CHECK THIS BOX.
  • Even if PsycINFO doesn't have the full text, our Find It! tool may be able to find the article elsewhere in our databases.
  • Checking this box means you won't see many of the articles that we do indeed have immediate full-text access to.

More PsycINFO Resources