During the last weeks, I worked with some colleagues on a website that aims to improve access to social work literature. We described the results in out paper Social Work Research Map – ein niederschwelliger Zugang zu internationalen Publikationen der Sozialen Arbeit, which has been published in the journal Soziale Passagen.
While the paper is written in german, there is also a technical report in english.
Abstract
Internationalization is a central topic in higher education policy in Germany. An orientation towards international discourses is also required in the teaching, research and practice of social work. Due to rapidly growing research results, obtaining a systematic overview of disciplinary knowledge is becoming increasingly difficult. This paper describes the development of an interactive website called Social Work Research Map, which should facilitate access to scientific publications in social work. For this purpose, a database with almost 25,000 journal articles from 23 social work journals was created. With the help of automated text analysis (topic modeling), the abstracts were examined and structured into 40 thematic clusters. Different visualization techniques and filter functions enable users to search the database independently according to their corresponding interests. Individual search results can be saved, and an artificial-intelligence-based recommendation system suggests similar publications. The development of SWORM is an example of the use of computer science methods in social work and illustrates the potential of structuring large amounts of text and making it accessible to people. At the same time, it becomes clear that the application of such methods is challenging for social scientists and that the use of AI raises ethical problems.
