Dissemination of research in clinical nursing journals.

AIM: The purposes of the study were to describe the extent of research, clinical and evidence-based practice articles published in clinical nursing journals and to explore the communication of research and practice knowledge in the clinical nursing literature using citation analysis. BACKGROUND: For nursing research to have an impact on clinical practice and build evidence for practice, findings from research must transfer into the clinical practice literature. By analysing the extent of research published in clinical nursing journals, the citations in those articles, and other characteristics of the nursing literature, we can learn more about the linkages between research and practice in nursing. DESIGN: This was a descriptive study of 768 articles and 18901 citations in those articles. METHODS: Feature articles were classified into four groups - (i) original research reports; (ii) clinical practice articles (non-data based papers on a clinical topic); (iii) systematic reviews, integrative literature reviews, guidelines and papers describing evidence-based practice; and (iv) others. Each citation was then examined to determine if it was a reference to a research study or to a document on clinical practice. RESULTS: Nearly a third of the articles in clinical nursing journals were reports on research studies; another third addressed clinical practice. Of the 14232 citations analysed in clinical nursing journals, 6142 were to research reports (43.2%) and about the same number of citations were to clinical documents (n = 5844, 41.1%). Medical research articles were cited most frequently - 27.1% of the citations in clinical journal articles. Nursing research articles were only 7.6% of the cited documents in clinical publications. CONCLUSIONS: Dissemination of research findings in the clinical nursing literature occurred at two levels: through articles that reported studies of potential value to the nurse's practice and citations to research publications within articles. Relevance to clinical practice. Disseminating research in journals that are geared to clinicians is essential to increase nurses' awareness of research findings that might be relevant to their practice. This study documented that articles in clinical nursing journals disseminated not only information about clinical practice, but also informed readers about research of potential value to the nurse's practice.

Citation analysis of the maternal/child nursing literature.

Few bibliometric studies have been done of the nursing literature; however, much can be learned about nursing and specialty areas of clinical practice by examining the articles published in nursing journals. The purposes of this study were to describe the extent of research, clinical, and evidence-based practice articles published in maternal/child nursing journals and the information sources used to develop that literature. A total of 112 articles and 2571 citations from three randomly selected maternal/child nursing journals were analyzed. Nearly half (n=51, 46%) of all articles were reports of original research studies. Research publications were cited most frequently including research studies published in medical journals (n=687, 26.7% of all the cited documents), followed by research studies published in nursing journals (n=371, 14.4%) and journals in other disciplines. The maternal/child nursing journals examined in this study are disseminating research findings to nurses for use in clinical practice.