Tracing the Social Work Literature: Exploring Connections to Allied Health through Citation Analysis

Social work is a complex and multidisciplinary field drawing on a wide range of literature in terms of format, age, and discipline. Librarians in both collections and public services must be aware of this diversity in order to serve this rapidly growing field. This study was designed to identify core journals in the social work field, the most commonly cited formats and the age of citations, to assess the use of non-social work journals in the social work literature, and to draw comparisons to results in allied health and social science disciplines. The ultimate goal of this work is to provide librarians supporting social work programs with data which can contribute to their assessment of collections, both for maintenance and accreditation, and which can allow them to have a broader understanding of the field and a more effective approach to instruction. 28,269 citations from 567 source articles were examined. Journal articles were the most commonly cited format (69.90%), followed by books (17.69%). Over 91% of all citations came from materials published after 1990 and over 50% of citations came from materials published in the last ten years. Of the 2,520 journals cited, 32 top journals (1.27%) accounted for 6,612 (33.46%) of all citations to journals. Of those 32 journals, six were assigned to the field of social work. The remaining core journals came from the fields of psychology, public health, psychiatry, family and gender studies, pediatrics, and medicine. Format distribution and citation age were found to be similar to that of psychology, health care management, health education, and nurse practitioners. There was little similarity with the fields of addictions treatment and sociology. Practical implications for librarians are discussed.