Finding Relevant Research in Youth Studies: Case Study on Christian Faith-Based Youth Work

As youth studies develops as an academic discipline, identifying relevant research publications becomes important. This paper describes the method and results of an exercise to identify published research on Christian faith-based youth work. A search structure of terminology for (youth work) and (Christian faith) was created and applied to five bibliographic databases, complemented by citation searching and colleague recommendations. Eight research articles were identified. Scopus proved to have the greatest sensitivity (ability to retrieve relevant articles) followed by ProQuest and Web of Science. Web of Science had the greatest precision (ability to avoid retrieving irrelevant articles) followed by Scopus and then ProQuest. JSTOR database retrieved one relevant article (retrieved on Web of Science anyway) and PSYC INFO none. For this topic, Scopus, Web of Science and ProQuest proved the most effective databases. For researchers and academics in youth studies, this paper provides a resource on methodology and published papers.