Background: Information sources for developing the nursing literature

Background Journals are an important method for disseminating research findings and other evidence for practice to nurses. Bibliometric analyses of nursing journals can reveal information about authorship, types of documents cited, and how information is communicated in nursing, among other characteristics. Objectives The purposes of our study were to describe the types of documents used to develop the clinical and research literature in nursing, and extent of gray literature cited in those publications. Design This was a descriptive study of 18,901 citations of articles in clinical specialty and research journals in nursing published between January 2004 and June 2005. Methods The research team reviewed each citation to assess if the cited document was a journal article, book chapter or book, or document falling into the category of gray literature. Frequency counts for each type of cited document were recorded. Results Most of the citations were to journal articles (n=14,392, 76.1%) and among those, to articles in medical journals (n=7719, 40.8% of all the citations). This was true for the literature as a whole and for the clinical specialty and research literature separately. Although citations to medical journals were most common, in the clinical nursing literature there was a significantly higher proportion of citations to medical journal articles (n=6332, 44.5%) than in the nursing research literature (n=1387, 29.7%) (, p