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Social Work

This guide provides descriptions of commonly used library resources for practice, research, and scholarship in the field of Social Work.

2) Craft your search

Transforming your topic into a question will help reframe it, improving the likelihood you will find information in a database and other sources.

On this page, you will learn about PICO, a technique for transforming topics into questions. Then you will learn how to develop search strategies to use in a database. 

On the next page, 3) Use the Databases, you will discover some of the most relevant sources in the behavioral sciences for finding articles and other information.

The PICO Framework

Evidence-based models will often suggest PICO as a process for framing a question and crafting search strategies.

The acronym PICO stands for:

P - problem or person or population

I - intervention or indicator

C - comparison

O - outcome 

For more information on the PICO framework, including examples and a worksheet template go to our PICO research guide.

5 Steps to an Effective Search Strategy (Run-time: 3 minutes, 53 seconds)

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