SWK 320: Introduction to Social Work: Home

Articles are short pieces of writing that describe results of original research, or review existing research.

Social Work Journals are publications that appear on a monthly or quarterly basis, and contain articles. They are often published by professional associations or academic publishers.

Peer Review is a process used by most journals to ensure high quality.  Authors submit their work for publication, and, before the journal accepts the article, the editors of the journal send the article out to other experts in the same field (peers) to have it critiqued (reviewed).

One way to find scholarly articles is to browse the journals themselves.

When you click on a Journal link, on the next screen click on UM Orono Access.

This will bring you to a page with a Search Box at the top, and some text in the middle.  Ignore the search box, and look at the text in the middle.  The image below shows you an example.

For this example, we are accessing the journal Research on Social Work Practice. Two links are provided; for each, check the date range, and choose the link that makes sense for what you need.  In this example, to see the most recent issues of the journal, we would click on the bottom link.

Instead of browsing the journals themselves, you may want to search across journals for articles on a specific topic.  For this class, try using the database Social Services Abstracts.

Plagiarism is the use of someone else's work or ideas and representing them as your own.  

Examples:

• Copying and pasting language from a web page into a paper without proper citation
• Using quotes from sources, such as journal articles, without proper citation
• Using an idea from a source, with some (or even all) of the words changed, without proper citation

Plagiarism is ethically wrong, and has repercussions here on campus.  It is listed as an Academic Misconduct Violation (Student Conduct Code, 2018, p. 8).

Here's a quick video tutorial that discusses ways to avoid plagiarism.

You need to use the American Psychological Association Style Manual (APA), 7th edition, to cite the articles you find.

Generally, you can follow this as a guide:

Author last name, First initial. Middle initial. (Year). Article title: Article subtitle. Journal Title, volume number(issue number), pages. doi:10-101010101

Example:

Ahn, H., Hartzel, S., & Shaw, T. (2018). Participants satisfaction with family involvement meetings. Research on Social Work Practice, 28(8), 952- 963.  doi:10.1177/1049731516666328

For more examples, please see the APA's Reference Examples page.

Article Linker (also known as 360 Link to Full Text) allows you to check for access to the full text of journal articles. This link brings you to a tutorial on how to use this application.