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Description: Abstract Objective: Swiss social work students have now published thousands of theses, many of which include primary qualitative research focusing on children’s homes. The titles of most theses written by Haute école de travail social et de la santé Lausanne’s (HETSL, previously EESP, founded in 1954) students are indexed in the regional database of canton Vaud (Renouvaud) and are also included in a national database (Swissbib). Abstracts from HETSL’s theses cannot be found in either Renouvaud or Swissbib and although there is a MeSH-equivalent in Renouvaud (“Rameaux”) many theses do not make use of this system and the closest rameau [Rameau: institution sociale] is not specific to children’s homes. Researchers, students and practitioners therefore need to rely on keyword searches alone to identify relevant works. In order to build well performing search filters meant to identify children’s home research the most common keywords used in the titles of children’s homes theses need to be identified. I am not aware of any similar work and could not find search filters focusing on children’s homes. Study design: Keyword frequency analysis Methods: The first social work graduate theses published in 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, 2013 and 2015 were manually sought from HETSL’s library on July 8 and July 14, 2020. Graduate theses published in each year period were then individually assessed sequentially according to their numerical indexing until n=10 theses whose focus were children’s homes were identified. Assessments were meant to be discontinued once a total of n=100 relevant theses had been found (10 theses per year period). Characteristics of all theses deemed to focus on children’s homes were also manually extracted in a data collection table. Theses references (titles) were then exported and analyzed using the Systematic Review Accelerator (https://sr-accelerator.com/) word frequency analyzer tool on July 16, 2020. Results: Data collection was interrupted early given concerns assessments would take much longer than planned. A total of 203 graduate theses from HETSL students published from 1960-2016 were manually assessed and 73 theses focusing on children’s homes (35.96% of the overall sample) were found. I could not tell if six (n=6) theses did or did not focus on children’s homes given unclear or insufficient details provided within the reports. Ten (n=10, or 4.93%) theses were apparently missing from the library, were not found and could not be assessed. The 73 children’s homes theses reported data on total of 53 different children’s homes. Five theses (n=5) focused on Lavigny. Three (n=3) theses each focused on Carrefour, le Cottage, Eben Hezer (unspecified), l’Espérance, la Maison des Jeunes (Lausanne), Perceval and Serix. Two (n=2) theses each focused on Astural, le Bercail, le Châtelard, la Cité du Genèvrier, les Clarines, l’Ecole Protestante d’Altitude, Valmont, Mémise and Vernand. Five theses (n=5) were not specific to an individual children’s home and the children’s homes studied could not be identified in nineteen (n=19) theses. Forty-nine (n=49) theses focused on Swiss children’s homes, most commonly from canton Vaud, which is where the HETSL is located. Excluding French “non-words”, a total of 435 words were found within theses focusing on children’s homes. The 20 most commonly found keywords were: enfants, professionnels, social, pratique, placement, foyer, éducateurs, comment, institutions, l’éducateur, ans, placé, en foyer, institution, la pratique, placés, placés en, travail, familles and face. The titles of total of 11 graduate theses (15.07% of the overall sample) were deemed to unspecific to help identify the topic of children’s homes. Limitations: The Systematic Review Accelerator word frequency analyzer tool did not appear to be designed to analyze French theses and underestimated the frequency of some keywords, assessments of whether a thesis did or did not focus on children’s homes involved subjectivity, identifying characteristics of children’s homes studied (canton) proved challenging and the sample may have been too small to find some of the less commonly used keywords. Discussion: Given difficulties in identifying characteristics of children’s homes studied a database of Swiss children’s homes names, year when founded, populations looked after, locations and other characteristics may prove helpful to both researchers and students. HETSL students could otherwise be encouraged to provide and emphasize these details when writing theses focusing on children’s homes. Stakeholders looking for Swiss children’s home theses should strongly consider using keywords such as “placé”, “placement”, “foyer”, “enfant”, “éducateur” and “institution” when browsing Swissbib or Renouvaud. The choice of keywords used to seek children’s home theses can widely influence search results. Researchers should be wary that graduate theses can have unspecific titles and some may be missing from the library or hard to find. Similar research projects would be much easier to undertake and less resource expensive if HETSL’s theses were available to download as electronic copies (online PDFs). Researchers using the Systematic Review Accelerator word frequency analyzer with French datasets should cautiously interpretate results given the tools limitations. Funding: No funding was received for this work. Registration: See https://osf.io/k27m3/files/ (see previous versions) Data and materials: See https://osf.io/k27m3/files/. All other data is otherwise included within this manuscript. Keywords: Children’s home, keywords, French, graduate thesis, Switzerland, social work Suggested citation: Vuillème, M. (July 16, 2020). Keyword frequency analysis of the titles of Swiss social work graduate theses focusing on children’s homes. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/K27M3