Exam Preparation Spotlight
Social Work Licensing Clinical Exam Guide by Location: Available OnlinePublication Date: 2024This guide has been carefully constructed to provide social workers with information on the licensure examination and passing the exam. Includes: test-taking strategies, methods for analyzing the questions, and the content areas.
Social Work Licensing Masters Exam Guide by Location: Available OnlinePublication Date: 2025This bestselling guide from Dawn Apgar is now updated with more practice questions and features to help you study for and pass the LMSW exam. Directions for access are available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dE25qe--71RN2fNcWfSQCZQYzs62aJ9gkBwXYJn89xU/edit?usp=sharing
Professional Advancement and Licensure
BU School of Social Work Career Guide
This rich career guide put together by the School of Social Work at BU covers career resources, strategies for identifying next steps, and all aspects of writing cover letters and resumes.
Build Your Cover Letter and Resume
The National Association of Social Workers shares examples of resumes for social work students and professionals. Their offerings also include templates for cover letters and other professional correspondence.
The School of Social Work offers comprehensive support with exams and licensure. Information on workshops and study groups is available for social work students.
Additional Exam Preparations
- ASWB Examination Guidebook
Location: Available Online
Published by ASWB, the ASWB Examination Guidebook contains information on taking the exam, what to expect on exam day, exam creation, and question structure.
Social work ASWB masters exam guide by Location: Available OnlineThis is an incredibly thorough review of the four content areas of the updated Masters exam, including testing strategies.
Social work ASWB masters practice test : 170 questions to identify knowledge gaps by Location: Available Online170 questions assist you in practicing for the ASWB exam and identify your personal knowledge gaps.
Social Work Aswb Clinical Exam Guide, Second Edition by Location: Available OnlinePublication Date: 2017Written by a renowned social work educator rather than an unknown at a test preparation company, this thoroughly updated guide helps readers identify their weak areas so they know what to focus on to pass the ASWB(R) Clinical licensure exam.
Top Journals and Rankings for Publication
Graduate students and faculty submitting articles for publication; faculty seeking to bolster tenure applications; and undergraduates interested in using the most authoritative analysis and data in writing research papers, all potentially have an interest in the highest ranked journals in their fields. As a result, there are numerous lists and citation-based metrics attempting to provide guidance. Journal rankings are intended, not only to reflect the place of a journal within its field, but also indicate the relative difficulty of being published in that journal.
Many lists of journals are subjective, depending upon subject grouping choices (what journals are included in the field of International Relations?), but citation-based metrics have permitted more objective criteria across disciplines. Some commonly used citation metrics are
- Impact factor – Reflecting the average number of citations to articles published in science and social science journals.
- Eigenfactor – A rating of the total importance of a scientific journal according to the number of incoming citations, with citations from highly ranked journals weighted to make a larger contribution to the eigenfactor than those from poorly ranked journals.
- h-index – Usually used as a measure of scientific productivity and the scientific impact of an individual scientist, but can also be used to rank journals.
- Altmetrics – Rate journals based on scholarly references added to academic social media sites.
In addition to the two sources noted here (Google and the subscription-only Journal Citation Reports), Harzing Publish or Perish Software is a free software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search to obtain the raw citations.
Google Scholar Metrics: Scholar Metrics provide a way for authors to quickly gauge the visibility and influence of recent articles in scholarly publications
Journal Citation Reports: Journal Citation Reports allows users to evaluate and compare journals using citation data drawn from science and social science journals from publishers in more than 80 countries. It shows research influence and impact at the journal and category levels, and the relationship between citing and cited journals.
Rankings are categorized by discipline with h5-index and h5-median scores.
Selected categories from the social sciences:
Associations
- National Association of Social Workers Provides information about NASW, the Code of Ethics, state NASW chapters, professional social work credentials, and publications. Gives views on many issues relevant to social work practice, including legislation.
- Council on Social Work Education Includes information about the organization and its programs and publications. Provides links to other social work associations and sites of interest.
- Association of Social Work Boards Provides information on licensing and examinations. Has links to sites that show licensing requirements for each state
- American Public Human Services Association The American Public Human Services Association (APHSA) is a bipartisan, nonprofit membership organization representing state and local human service agencies through their top-level leadership. Through our member network and three national Collaborative Centers, APHSA seeks to influence modern policies and practices that support the health and well-being of all children and families and that lead to stronger communities. APHSA connects its members to national policymakers and human-serving organizations across a wide circle of stakeholders in the health and human services sector, as well as key partners in education, housing, employment and others. APHSA also helps members build more capacity for their teams through access to our professional education and development conferences, technical expertise, publications and our Organizational Effectiveness practice.
