Social Work

Resources and tools for selecting social work materials, including journals, books, and other formats.

Current Page Editor: Scott Marsalis

• Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) Press

• National Association of Social Workers (NASW) Press

• Assessing the quality and prestige of disciplinary social work journals: A national study of faculty perceptions.

  Hodge, D. R., Yu, M., & Kim, A. (2020). Assessing the quality and prestige of disciplinary social work journals: A national study of faculty perceptions. Research on Social Work Practice, 30(4), 451-459. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049731519890402

• An Author's Guide to Social Work Journals.

  An Author's Guide to Social Work Journals. (NASW Press, 2009).

• Evaluation of social work journal quality: Citation versus reputation approaches.

  Sellers, S. L., Mathiesen, S. G., Perry, R., & Smith, T. (2004). Evaluation of social work journal quality: Citation versus reputation approaches. Journal of Social Work Education, 40(1), 143-160. https://doi.org/10.1080/10437797.2004.10778484

• Journals in social work and related disciplines manuscript submission information with impact factors, five-year impact factors and H-indexes.

  Leung, P. & Cheung, M. (2020). Journals in social work and related disciplines: Manuscript submission information with impact factors, five-year impact factors and H-indexes. https://uh.edu/socialwork/academics/cwep/title-iv-e/Journals-Impact-Factor/journalsimpactfactorshindexv2_07302020.pdf

• Laying the foundations for scientometric research: A data science approach

  Perron, B. E., Victor, B. G., Hodge, D. R., Salas-Wright, C. P., Vaughn, M. G., & Taylor, R. J. (2017). Laying the foundations for scientometric research: A data science approach. Research on Social Work Practice, 27(7), 802-812. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049731515624966

• Ranking disciplinary social work journals: Comparing faculty perceptions with two citation-based approaches.

  Hodge, D. R., Yu, M., & Kim, A. (2021). Ranking disciplinary social work journals: Comparing faculty perceptions with two citation-based approaches. Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research, 12(1), 109-129. https://doi.org/10.1086/713306

• Social work's (very few) gold OA journals

  Pendell, K. (2020, April 30). Social work's (very few) gold OA journals. Open Social Work. https://opensocialwork.org/2020/04/30/gold-oa-journals/

• Toward a sustainable method for core journal lists: A test case using journals in social work.

  Aubele, J. & Perruso, C. (2017). Toward a sustainable method for core journal lists: A test case using journals in social work. The Serials Librarian, 73(2), 89–106. https://doi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2017.1342113

These companies and organizations compile disciplinary list of journals based on citation metrics.

• EigenFactor.org - Social Work Journals

  List of journals in the 2015 Journal Citation Reports Social Work category, sorted by EigenFactor. Publicly available database.

• Google Scholar Metrics - Social Work

  Google Scholar Metrics gathers citation information from articles in Google Scholar and ranks journals by the number of times citations appear in their publicly available database.

• InCites Journal Citation Reports - Social Work

  Subscription database from Clarivate which provides Impact Factor and related metrics and rankings on top journals by discipline. Social work is included as well as journals in subject areas such as gerontology, substance abuse, social issues, family studies, health policy & services and social psychology.

• Scopus Journal Analyzer

  Scopus, a subscription database, offers their own algorithms to rank and compare journals in a subject area.

The following list is updated annually and reflects data published in Journal Citation Reports and current studies addressing knowledge dissemination and scholarship in social work. Last edited by Stephen Maher & Scott Marsalis in August 2021.