Social Work

You can use the BU Libraries Search box to look for print and electronic resources available through the Boston University Libraries. These resources include print books and journals available in the library stacks, as well as e-books and full-text journal articles.

Want support getting started with your search? Check out our searching the library tutorial page.

Advanced searching allows us to be very detailed with our search results. We have more control over the terms we used and how we use them together. It allows all of us as researchers to narrow the focus of our results and eliminate irrelevant books are articles. It helps bring us closer to the results we are looking for.

To get to BU Advanced Search, you can go to the Advanced Search Page or click where it says "Advanced Search" on the library search page.

In this example below, we go from BU Libraries Search to Advanced Search. We then changed the search filter to "Subject" as demonstrated by the red arrows on the left side. We then added in the keywords relevant to our research, which are "family therapy," "substance use," and "adolescent." We then also changed the year of the results to start in 2014 as demonstrated by the red arrow on the right side. This will bring results only from the last 10 years.  

For more advanced research inquiries, we may choose to start our search within a database. For a list of databases and tips for social work database research, please visit our library guide.

Check out this video to learn about "Boolean operators" which are tools for broadening and narrowing your search:

Boolean operators use AND, OR, NOT to limit or expand a search.

The capitalization of these letters is important. A lot of databases require these to be capitalized in this context.

OR: Results containing keywords A or B.

Example: dogs OR cats

AND: Only results that contain both keywords.

Example: dogs AND cats

NOT: Results containing keyword A, excluding any with B.

Example: dogs NOT cats