Exploring the Landscape of Research on Client Documentation in Social Work: A Scoping Review

Summary Client documentation fulfills a variety of purposes in social work. As research on this topic has steadily increased, so has the need to take stock of what characterizes the literature in this area. This paper presents the results of a scoping review of 490 peer-reviewed articles published in English in this field, with a specific analysis of a subsample ( n = 95) that explicitly focuses on documentation as a research theme and relies on client documentation as a source of data. Findings While nearly half of the 490 articles analyzed mention documentation in at least four sections, only one-third posed research questions directly addressing it. This suggests that much of the peer-reviewed literature in English on documentation in social work treats documentation tangentially rather than as a central theme. The array of analyses performed also shows that documentation research is unevenly distributed across social work domains, and that Child Welfare and Protective Services (CWPS) is the domain that has thus far contributed the most to research in this area. In addition, this review highlights the key areas of inquiry that are addressed in research that uses client documentation as data and has research questions/aims on documentation. Applications This paper exposes some of the knowledge gaps that characterize social work research on client documentation and argues that investing in delineating a future research agenda for this topic would benefit not only social work scholarship but also practice.