Frequently asked questions

Practora is a research tool for social work students and practitioners. You can search scholarly literature, read a scoped assistant's explanation of what the sources say, and export citations that have been checked against Crossref where a DOI exists.

It is built for one field. The search ranking, the practice filters, and the assistant are all tuned for social work practice, field education, research literacy, policy, and ethics.

How to use PractoraStart searching

No. Search, SocialGPT, source pages, and assignment exports all work without signing in, and there is no charge to use them.

Saved libraries and folders are not available yet. Anything you collect for an export is stored in your own browser, not on a server.

If your input reads like a question, Practora opens a SocialGPT reply above the results and uses the retrieved sources to ground it. If it reads like keywords, you get the ranked list of sources on its own.

Use a full question when you want an explanation you can follow up on. Use keywords such as a population, a setting, or an intervention name when you mainly want citable articles.

Results come from OpenAlex, an open catalog of scholarly works. When a result has a DOI, Practora requests the record from Crossref and prefers those fields when it formats the citation.

Practora does not host papers. It links out to the publisher or open-access copy so you can read the original.

Read the methodology

When a DOI is present, Practora fetches the Crossref record and compares it with the search metadata before building the APA 7 reference. Fields that are missing are shown as "Not available" rather than guessed.

Citations that could not be fully matched are labeled unverified or partially verified with an explicit warning. Treat those as drafts and check them against the article itself.

How verification works

No. Ranking is a discoverability score, not a quality judgment. It combines text relevance to your parsed keywords, recency, citation count, open-access availability, whether an abstract exists, and social-work relevance terms.

A well-matched query term can lift a weak study, and a strong study with an unusual title can sit lower. Appraisal is still your job.

See the exact weightsGuide: appraising what you find

Coverage depends on what publishers deposit. Book chapters, dissertations, agency reports, practice magazines, and very recent articles are indexed inconsistently, and some records are missing abstracts or DOIs entirely.

If you know the article exists, searching the exact title or the DOI is usually the fastest way to surface it. For gray literature, go to the issuing organization directly.

No. Use it alongside them. Practora is faster for orienting yourself to a topic and for producing verified citations, but curated databases have controlled subject vocabularies and coverage that an open catalog does not match.

For a graded literature review or anything systematic, search your institution's databases as well and document what you searched.

SocialGPT is Practora's scoped assistant. It answers questions about social work practice, interventions and settings, field education and supervision, research methods and evidence use, social welfare policy, and ethics.

It refuses anything outside that: coding, personal finance, medical diagnosis, legal advice, crisis support, and general trivia. When it refuses, it suggests in-scope prompts instead.

Cite the sources, not the assistant. SocialGPT is a reading aid: it summarizes and points to the articles returned for your search using inline markers like [1] and [2].

Open the cited source, confirm it says what the summary claims, and cite that article. Many programs also have explicit policies on generative AI, so check your syllabus.

Yes. It can misread a source, overstate a finding, or generalize past the population a study actually enrolled. It is grounded in the sources returned for your search, but grounding is not proof.

Anything you plan to repeat in a paper, a case note, or a supervision meeting should be checked against the original article first.

No. Practora is a research and education tool. It does not diagnose, recommend treatment, provide legal advice, or handle emergencies, and it is not a substitute for supervision or your own professional judgment.

If someone is in immediate danger, use your local emergency and crisis services.

No. Do not enter names, dates of birth, addresses, case or record numbers, or any other detail that could identify a client, in a search, a follow-up question, or an export note.

Search terms are sent to OpenAlex, and to Crossref for DOI verification, to retrieve scholarly metadata. Write your questions at the level of a population or a practice problem instead of a person.

Privacy details

Add sources to your working set from search results or a source page, then open Exports to produce an APA reference list, an annotated bibliography starter, or a sources-used checklist.

The working set lives in your browser's local storage. Clearing site data or switching devices will empty it, so export before you close out a session.

Open exports

It is a reasonable starting point for scoping a topic, finding seed articles, and following citation trails from a source page. It is not sufficient on its own for a systematic review.

A defensible review needs a documented search strategy across multiple databases, explicit inclusion criteria, and a record of what was screened. Treat Practora as one of those databases, not all of them.

Guide: evidence-based practice