Mapping the literature of nursing education

As part of a project to map the literature of nursing, sponsored by the Nursing and Allied Health Resources Section of the Medical Library Association, this study identifies core journals cited in nursing education journals and the indexing services that cover the cited journals.

Three nursing education source journals were subjected to a citation analysis of articles from 1997 to 1999, followed by an analysis of database access to the most frequently cited journal titles.

Cited formats included journals (62.4%), books (31.3%), government documents (1.4%), Internet (0.3%), and miscellaneous (4.6%). Cited references were relatively older than other studies, with just 58.6% published in the 1990s. One-third of the citations were found in a core of just 6 journal titles; one-third were dispersed among a middle zone of 53 titles; the remaining third were scattered in a larger zone of 762 titles. Indexing coverage for the core titles was most comprehensive in CINAHL, followed by PubMed/MEDLINE and Social Sciences Citation Index.

Citation patterns in nursing education show more reliance on nursing and education literature than biomedicine. Literature searches need to include CINAHL and PubMed/MEDLINE, as well as education and social sciences databases. Likewise, library collections need to include education and social sciences resources to complement works developed for nurse educators.