Mapping the literature of nurse practitioners

This study was designed to identify core journals for the nurse practitioner specialty and to determine the extent of their indexing in bibliographic databases.

As part of a larger project for mapping the literature of nursing, this study followed a common methodology based on citation analysis. Four journals designated by nurse practitioners as sources for their practice information were selected. All cited references were analyzed to determine format types and publication years. Bradford's Law of Scattering was applied to identify core journals. Nine bibliographic databases were searched to estimate the index coverage of the core titles.

The findings indicate that nurse practitioners rely primarily on journals (72.0%) followed by books (20.4%) for their professional knowledge. The majority of the identified core journals belong to non-nursing disciplines. This is reflected in the indexing coverage results: PubMed/MEDLINE more comprehensively indexes the core titles than CINAHL does.

Nurse practitioners, as primary care providers, consult medical as well as nursing sources for their information. The implications of the citation analysis findings are significant for collection development librarians and indexing services.