This paper amalgamates findings from an initial survey carried out for the Research Sub-committee of the Joint University Council of Social Work Education Committee (JUC SWEC), identifying universities offering research doctorates within the field of social work, and a subsequent survey focused on social work doctoral students. The first aimed to identify where doctoral research was being carried out, what kind of doctoral programmes existed, and the scale of the doctoral enterprise in the social work field. The second survey gives some initial indications regarding the motivation of social work students undertaking research at doctoral level, who was studying and what were their career paths, and what type of research was being carried out. An immediate question arose while conceptualizing the research, namely,'what is a social work doctorate?'The only UK database claiming to identify social work doctorates yielded an incomplete sample, which also contained some titles that did not relate to social work (Lyons, 2002). This was also reiterated in the responses to the initial survey. A further question concerned the identification of'sites of production', and the invisibility of some research in this field. For instance, some social work research is found in other departments such as sociology, social policy or health studies. Doctoral research has to some extent been ignored in the wider framework of knowledge creation and retention in the UK in the field of social work.