Research literature production on nursing competences from 1981 till 2012: A bibliometric snapshot

When nurse education has moved away from a hospital based apprenticeship to a higher education institutions and new EU legislature enabled nurse workforce mobility, the term "competence" became an important concept in nurse education and practice. However, there is still a lot of confusion about its definition, how it should be assessed and implemented and which competences does a contemporary nurse need.

To find publishing patterns in the nursing competence research literature production, focusing on publishing dynamics, identifying prolific research entities, most cited papers, and visualising the content of the research.

A bibliometric analysis of 370 information sources (288 original papers and 82 review articles) found in the Scopus database using the search string "nursing competenc*" for the period 1981-2012 was conducted. The SciMago database was used to identify country and source title ranks.

Common elements of bibliometric data were extracted from each information source. Descriptive, correspondence and text analyses were used on the retrieved bibliometric data.

The production of research literature has a positive trend. The research on nursing competences is being performed on all five continents, however is not yet published in top journals. Most prolific countries are the United States of America, the United Kingdom and Australasia, and most prolific source titles are the Journal of clinical nursing, the Journal of nursing education and Public health nursing. The results confirmed the still persisting confusion in the definition of the competence and the emergence of the need for defining new nursing competences.

Study confirmed that there are still open questions in the nursing competence research that will require actions on different levels including policy makers, educators and practising nurses.