Social Work Knowledge Production and Utilisation: An International Comparison

The social work profession has a long-standing commitment to social innovation and to the production and utilisation of knowledge to improve social work processes, practices and social welfare policy. To extend understanding of knowledge production and utilisation in social work, this study compares the most highly cited US and European social work articles in their contributions to a cumulative body of research and scholarship that is contributing to knowledge development and innovation in the field. One hundred highly cited English-language articles were analysed from a previous study: sixty-nine US articles andthirty-one European articles. To assess the types of knowledge social work readers and writers find most important, the articles were first classified by content. They then were categorised into non-research or research articles, with the research articles further delineated by their potential contribution to practice decision making. The results show the majority of European articles are about the profession of social work itself or theory while US articles report widely on populations, research and intervention effectiveness. The majority of articles in Europeare non-research articles, where as the majority of articles in the USA are research articles. Among research and non-research articles, 15 per cent of US articles report on intervention effectiveness, while 3 per cent of European articles report on intervention effectiveness.