AI-Assisted Curation of Conference Scholarship: Compiling, Structuring, and Analyzing Two Decades of Presentations at the Society for Social Work and Research

2026-03-06

AI Summary

This study addresses the long-standing absence of a systematic data infrastructure for tracking academic trends and methodological evolution in social work research. For the first time, AI-assisted methods are introduced to this domain: a web crawler collected 23,793 abstracts from the Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR) annual conferences spanning 2005–2026; a small language model (gpt-oss:20b) automatically classified research methodologies and author affiliations, with manual validation ensuring accuracy. The resulting structured, open-access database reveals that conference output has grown at an average annual rate of 7.5%, international collaboration has increased from 4.5% to 13.5%, and while quantitative methods remain dominant, qualitative approaches are steadily rising. This resource provides a reproducible foundation and analytical framework for future scholarly inquiry in the discipline.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Humans and AI: Understanding People, Theories, Concepts and Methods

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Social Networks and Social Media: Social mining and social search on the Web
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Robustness and generalizability of Web mining methods

Abstract

Purpose: This study developed a comprehensive database of presentation abstracts from the Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR) Annual Conference and examined patterns in research methodology, authorship, collaboration, and institutional participation over two decades. Method: Abstract metadata was compiled from the SSWR Confex conference management system for presentations from 2005 to 2026 using web scraping. A small language model (gpt-oss:20b) performed classification and extraction tasks on abstracts, including categorization of methodologies and parsing of author affiliations, with human review at each major stage to ensure accuracy. Results: The database contains 23,793 presentations with 69,924 author records representing 20,779 unique researchers from 4,049 institutions across 93 countries. Annual conference presentations increased from 423 in 2005 to 1,935 in 2026, representing a compound annual growth rate of 7.5%. Quantitative methods predominated (61.1%), followed by qualitative approaches (23.4%), mixed methods (9.1%), and reviews (5.4%). The mean number of authors per presentation increased from 2.22 in 2005 to 3.31 in 2026. International participation grew from 4.5% to 13.5% of author affiliations over the observation period. Discussion: Findings indicate substantial growth in SSWR conference participation, alongside increased collaboration and international engagement. The methodological distribution reveals continued quantitative predominance with growing qualitative representation. This database provides research infrastructure for systematic hypothesis testing about research priorities and disciplinary development over time, enabling analyses that inform both scholarship and conference planning.

Problem

• conference scholarship
• research trends
• social work research
• academic collaboration
• methodological patterns

Innovation

• AI-assisted curation
• small language model
• web scraping
• structured academic database
• methodology classification