Database scope

What does Social Care Online cover?

Core subject areas where all relevant material is collected include:

Supporting subjects, where items are collected selectively, include:

  • benefits and personal finance
  • criminal justice, law and rights
  • education (covered very selectively for books and articles, with a tight focus on social care issues, including mental health, social exclusion, school exclusion and policy issues around inclusive learning), training and employment
  • health and health care
  • housing
  • local government
  • management and organisational development
  • psychology

Which countries does Social Care Online cover?

Core material from the UK is collected, together with non-UK material if:

  • the subject matter is not well covered in UK literature
  • it is a comparative study
  • it contains topics of relevance to the UK
  • it contains overviews of the situation in other countries

Where do we collect information from?

All information is sourced and evaluated by SCIE’s information specialists. Publisher mailing lists, current awareness, alerting services and twitter feeds are all used to source a wide range of material for Social Care Online from:

  • academic institutions
  • think-tanks and research organisations
  • government departments
  • local government
  • voluntary sector organisations and charities
  • commercial publishers

All SCIE’s own publications – research briefings, guides, knowledge reviews, Social Care TV films and elearning materials - are also indexed on Social Care Online.

Which journals are covered by Social Care Online?

All major journal titles in social care published in the UK are covered by Social Care Online.

Key titles from other countries, provided they are published in English, are selectively indexed.

Full list of journal titles covered.

How is material indexed on Social Care Online?

To improve information retrieval and to help users find the most relevant information, resources on Social Care Online are assigned/given additional indexing terms or descriptors. Social Care Online indexes material by subject, content type and geography.

Social Care Online subject thesaurus

Subject terms are taken from the Social Care Online thesaurus, a controlled vocabulary of terms developed by the Social Care Institute for Excellence specifically for Social Care Online. The thesaurus helps to ensure that all items on a particular topic can be retrieved using the same subject term. The Social Care Online thesaurus is freely available to view and download.

The Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) is happy for other organisations to use the Social Care Online subject taxonomy in whole or in part, providing acknowledgement of the source is given. If you are interested in using the Social Care Online thesaurus within your organisation, please email us.

Social Care Online content types

Content types are assigned to selected resources on Social Care Online to provide more information about a particular resource and the nature of its contents. Content types include: research, practice guidance and government publication. Not every resource on Social Care Online is assigned a content type.

Social Care Online geography indexing

Geography indexing on Social Care Online is applied at country level. The individual countries of the UK: England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland are also used to index material. Geography indicates the content or the jurisdiction of a resource. Not all items on Social Care Online have country indexing assigned.

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