Open bibliographic data for social work scholarship

The Social Work Meta-Data Project

Two curated bibliographic databases documenting the scholarly record of social work: the discipline's journal literature and two decades of conference scholarship, built as infrastructure for scientometric analysis and literature discovery.

Brian E. Perron, PhD · University of Michigan
Bryan G. Victor, PhD · Wayne State University
Zia Qi, MSW · University of Michigan

SWRD Social Work Research Database SSWR Conference Database

public read-only access 62,602 articles · 23,793 presentations no account required

62,602

research articles classified
on method & document type

23,793

conference presentations,
every SSWR meeting 2005–2026

disciplinary social work
journals, 1989–2025

01 Start here

Instant access for AI assistants

The fastest way to work with the data is to hand one of two skill files to an AI assistant, such as Claude, ChatGPT, or any comparable system. Each file is a self-contained instruction set. Once read, an assistant can run read-only analysis queries, search the literature by meaning, and pull filtered slices of records, using a built-in public access key. No password, account, or installation required.

skills/swrd-database-skill.md

SWRD skill file

Equips an assistant to query the journal-article database: 62,602 research articles across 88 journals, 1989–2025.

Download skill file

skills/sswr-database-skill.md

SSWR skill file

Equips an assistant to query the conference database: 23,793 presentations with disambiguated authors, 2005–2026.

Download skill file

step 1

Download a skill file and attach or paste it into your assistant's conversation.

step 2

Ask a question in plain English: counts, trends, or a topical literature slice.

step 3

The assistant runs tested, read-only queries against the live databases and returns results.

02 Get the data

Download the databases

Complete CSV exports of both databases: every record, ready for Excel, R, Python, or SPSS. No forms, no registration. Each download includes a README describing every file and the citation.

Data release v1.0 · July 2026 The data are versioned: corrections and additions are published as new numbered releases, and every prior version remains available under All releases & versions.

⬇ SWRD · journal articles (CSV, 27 MB) ⬇ SSWR · conference presentations (CSV, 26 MB) All releases & versions

The SWRD download is exactly the 62,602-article corpus of the 2026 article, with the historical Supplement and linkage tables packaged alongside it.

03 The two databases

Structured records, not full texts

Each record holds title, abstract, authors and affiliations, venue, year, and classification labels, and links to the source article through its DOI.

SWRD

Social Work Research Database

The SWRD comprises 62,602 research articles with abstracts from 88 disciplinary social work journals, 1989–2025. This is precisely the corpus described in Perron, Victor, & Qi (2026), compiled through multi-source integration and deduplication. Every article is classified on two dimensions:

SCI Scientific communication: original research, distinguished from editorials, book reviews, and letters.

MTH Methodology: quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods, or systematic / other review.

Classified with a supervised language-model procedure validated against human raters (κ ≥ .85 per task).

The SWRD · 1989–2025 62,602

Supplement · 1920–1988 (partial) 23,289

The Supplement covers the same journals back to 1920; coverage is substantially incomplete, so treat counts as lower bounds.

SSWR

Conference Database

All 23,793 presentations (papers, posters, and symposia) from every SSWR annual conference, 2005 through 2026, compiled from official conference programs.

ABS Every record includes the full abstract and a research-method classification.

ID 21,209 presenting authors disambiguated across years, with name variants resolved to canonical identities.

Author-level disambiguation supports longitudinal analysis of individual scholars, institutions, and topics across two decades of the field's principal research meeting.

Presentations · 2005–2026 23,793

Disambiguated authors 21,209

Abstract and methodology coverage is complete across all conference years.

The complete journal list: all 88 journals in the SWRD corpus click to expand

Each journal is shown with its number of research articles in the 1989–2025 corpus. Counts sum to 62,602.

Abolitionist Perspectives in Social Work11

Administration in Social Work884

Advances in Social Work764

Affilia-Feminist Inquiry in Social Work916

African Journal of Social Work227

Aotearoa New Zealand Social Work220

Arete199

ASEAN Social Work Journal53

Asia Pacific Journal of Social Work and Development264

Asian Social Work and Policy Review42

Australian Social Work1,047

British Journal of Social Work3,565

Canadian Social Work Review538

Child & Adolescent Social Work Journal1,375

Child & Family Social Work1,450

Children & Schools449

China Journal of Social Work275

Clinical Social Work Journal1,183

Columbia Social Work Review135

Contemporary Rural Social Work214

Critical and Radical Social Work311

Critical Social Work248

Ethics & Social Welfare201

European Journal of Social Work1,345

Families in Society1,752

Global Social Work / Trabajo Social Global204

Health & Social Work924

Hong Kong Journal of Social Work211

Indian Journal of Social Work1,172

International Journal of Social Welfare1,170

International Journal of Social Work Values and Ethics70

International Social Work1,761

Journal of Community Practice735

Journal of Comparative Social Work374

Journal of Ethnic & Cultural Diversity in Social Work478

Journal of Evidence-Based Social Work612

Journal of Family Social Work616

Journal of Forensic Social Work90

Journal of Gerontological Social Work2,075

Journal of HIV-AIDS & Social Services477

Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment1,745

Journal of Human Rights and Social Work340

Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy31

Journal of Practice Teaching and Learning66

Journal of Progressive Human Services328

Journal of Psychosocial Oncology1,353

Journal of Religion & Spirituality in Social Work119

Journal of Social Service Research1,368

Journal of Social Work798

Journal of Social Work Education1,874

Journal of Social Work Education and Practice202

Journal of Social Work in Disability & Rehabilitation273

Journal of Social Work in End-Of-Life & Palliative Care358

Journal of Social Work Practice1,236

Journal of Social Work Practice in the Addictions543

Journal of Social Work Research and Evaluation98

Journal of Teaching in Social Work1,034

Journal of Technology in Human Services990

Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research417

Nordic Social Work Research442

Practice: Social Work in Action174

Professional Development: The International Journal of Continuing Social Work Education209

Psychoanalytic Social Work376

Qualitative Social Work1,006

Reflections: Narratives of Professional Helping858

Research on Social Work Practice2,224

School Social Work Journal291

Sexual and Gender Diversity in Social Services602

Social Development Issues269

Social Service Review765

Social Work1,945

Social Work & Christianity15

Social Work & Social Sciences Review216

Social Work and Society622

Social Work Education2,064

Social Work in Health Care1,663

Social Work in Mental Health753

Social Work in Public Health877

Social Work Research673

Social Work Research & Abstracts33

Social Work with Groups965

Social Work-Maatskaplike Werk995

Southern African Journal of Social Work and Social Development206

Studies in Clinical Social Work: Transforming Practice, Education and Research925

The Jewish Social Work Forum27

The Journal of Baccalaureate Social Work330

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare1,181

Urban Social Work86

04 Record structure

A common shape across both databases

Records share a single field structure, so an analysis written against one database transfers cleanly to the other.

Field Contents

Title Full title

Authors All authors in order, with institutional affiliations

Venue Journal or conference, year, volume / issue / pages

Abstract Full abstract, where available

Classification Scientific / non-scientific; methodology category

Identifier DOI: the article's permanent link

05 Semantic search

Retrieval by meaning, not just keywords

Every abstract is encoded with a text-embedding model that maps a passage to a numerical representation of its meaning. A query for kinship care therefore retrieves work phrased as relative caregivers, a class of misses to which keyword systems are systematically prone.

Every embedding model tested outperformed keyword retrieval on this corpus (preliminary results).

A lightweight "second look" reranking stage lifted the small model to the top of the preliminary leaderboard.

EmbeddingGemma (Google, 300M) offered the standout quality-to-size ratio: small enough to run locally, at no cost, with no data leaving your machine. It was benchmarked head-to-head against eleven alternatives, entirely on local hardware, in our embedding study.

All abstracts in both databases are already encoded, so semantic retrieval requires no additional setup. Full benchmark: the embeddings report.

06 What you can ask

Analytic possibilities

Topical literature mapping

Retrieve all matching articles and presentations across decades, robust to terminological variation.

Disciplinary trends

Empirical work rose from 43% of publications in the 1990s to 72% in the 2020s; mean authors per article grew from 1.85 to 3.35.

Scholar & institutional trajectories

Longitudinal records of SSWR presentation activity, supported by author disambiguation.

Gap identification

Surface under-studied topics, populations, venues, and periods.

Known limitations

SWRD author names are preserved as published. Disambiguation is not yet performed in the SWRD, so name variants may appear as distinct entries, so treat SWRD author-level counts with caution. The SSWR database is disambiguated.
Abstract coverage is uneven. About 72% of SWRD records from 1989 onward include abstracts; classification labels exist only where abstracts do.
The Supplement undercounts its era, reflecting what has survived digitization rather than the full publication record.

Found a problem in the data?

Scientific meta-data are inherently messy: name variants, duplicate records, missing fields, and misclassifications survive even careful curation. If you spot one, please open an issue and include a link that documents the correct value: for SWRD records, the article's DOI or publisher page; for SSWR records, the official conference program, which every SSWR record must ultimately match. Every report is reviewed, and corrections are published in versioned data releases so they reach everyone who uses the databases.

Report a data problem

07 Citing the databases

If you use the data, please cite it

The SWRD

Perron, B. E., Victor, B. G., & Qi, Z. (2026). Evolution of social work knowledge production over 35 years: An AI-enabled analysis of trends in empiricism, methodology, collaboration, citation patterns, and output. Research on Social Work Practice.

doi.org/10.1177/10497315261416833

The SSWR Conference Database

Perron, B. E., Victor, B. G., & Qi, Z. (2026). AI-assisted curation of conference scholarship: Compiling, structuring, and analyzing two decades of presentations at the Society for Social Work and Research. arXiv (in press, Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research).

doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.06814

The SWRD's original version (1989–2013) was introduced in Perron, Victor, Hodge, Salas-Wright, Vaughn, & Taylor (2017), Research on Social Work Practice, 27(7), 802–812.