Social Work Subject Guide

• What are you researching?
• Understand or interpret the question or task
• What information do you need?

• What are your criteria?
• Plan your keywords
• Develop meaningful search strategies.

• Identify appropriate search tools
• Explore the information
• Use search filters
• Build a picture of your topic.

Can’t find what you are looking for? Try revisiting your plan and keywords.

• Who, what, where, when and why?
• Is it relevant to your question or task?
• Do you have permission to use the information?
• Read abstracts to help make decisions.

If your results aren’t quite right for your needs, try searching again or revisit your plan.

• Save and organise your results
• Read the information and make notes
• Decide how it fits into the research question or task
• Keep a record of your sources for referencing purposes.