Information for Practice

Information for Practice is a unique, international, online resource for social care/social welfare/social work professionals that focuses on aggregating news and new scholarship for professional practice. The constantly updated, free service was developed by Professor Gary Holden in partnership with the Division of Social Work and Behavioral Science, Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Dr. Holden both edits the site, which had nearly 100,000 views, 57,000 visitors, and more than 35,000 posts in 2019, and manages the @Info4Practice Twitter feed, which has close to 5,000 followers.

According to Dr. Holden, “Our goal since the first version of Information for Practice was conceived in 1993 has been to place a virtual social work library on the desktops of social workers throughout the world.” 

Hosted at ifp.nyu.edu, Information for Practice provides direct links to significant content relevant to social service professionals in the following topic areas: article abstracts from scholarly journals; open access journal articles; various forms of professional guidelines; abstracts or full text meta-analyses and systematic reviews; new monographs and edited collections; infographics, videos and historical items curated from a variety of sources including popular media, government, organizational and academic sites; news from around the world; grey literature, including government, scientific, and industrial reports that are not commercially published; calls and consultations, including for conference presentations, journal submissions and nominations for awards; clinical trials that are planned or currently recruiting participants; and funding opportunities for research and service.

Beyond visiting the website directly or following it on Twitter, practitioners may also create personal RSS feeds from the entire site or from any subset of categories. They may also join the more than 2,000 subscribers to the site’s listserv, who receive a notice when each month’s archives are available for review. To do so, send a blank email to join-information-for-practice@lists.nyu.edu.

Further background on IP can be found in these two articles:

Holden, G., Tuchman, E., Barker, K., Rosenberg, G., Thazin, M., Kuppens, S., & Watson, M. (2012). A few thoughts on evidence in social work. Social Work in Health Care, 51, 483-505.

Holden, G., Barker, K., Rosenberg, G., & Cohen, J. (2012). Information for clinical social work practice: A potential solution. Clinical Social Work Journal, 40, 166-174.