Bibliometric study of grey literature in core veterinary medical journals.
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OBJECTIVES: Grey literature has been perceived by many as belonging to the primary sources of information and has become an accepted method of nonconventional communication in the sciences and medicine. Since little is known about the use and nature of grey literature in veterinary medicine, a systematic study was done to analyze and characterize the bibliographic citations appearing in twelve core veterinary journals. METHODS: Citations from 2,159 articles published in twelve core veterinary journals in 2000 were analyzed to determine the portion of citations from grey literature. Those citations were further analyzed and categorized according to the type of publication. RESULTS: Citation analysis yielded 55,823 citations, of which 3,564 (6.38%) were considered to be grey literature. Four veterinary specialties, internal medicine, pathology, theriogenology, and microbiology, accounted for 70% of the total number of articles. Three small-animal clinical practice journals cited about 2.5-3% grey literature, less than half that of journals with basic research orientations, where results ranged from almost 6% to approximately 10% grey literature. Nearly 90% of the grey literature appeared as conferences, government publications, and corporate organization literature. CONCLUSIONS: The results corroborate other reported research that the incidence of grey literature is lower in medicine and biology than in some other fields, such as aeronautics and agriculture. As in other fields, use of the Internet and the Web has greatly expanded the communication process among veterinary professionals. The appearance of closed community email forums and specialized discussion groups within the veterinary profession is an example of what could become a new kind of grey literature. (+info)
Returning to the Alder Hey report and its reporting: addressing confusions and improving inquiries.
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The Royal Liverpool Children's Inquiry investigated the circumstances leading to the removal, retention, and disposal of human tissue, including children's organs, at the Royal Liverpool Children's NHS Trust (the Alder Hey Hospital). It recommended changes to procedures for obtaining consent for postmortems and retaining organs and tissues for research or education. However, the report contains five areas of confusion. Firstly, it allowed the cultural and historical traditions of horror over the use and misuse of body parts to suffuse the logical analysis of past wrongs and future rights. Secondly, it makes an inappropriate conflation between seeking redress for past wrongs and shaping future policy. Thirdly, the report takes a muddled stance over the value of bodily integrity at burial. Fourthly, the report is inconsistent over the justification for future organ and tissue collections. Fifthly, the notion of "respect" is used with troublesome looseness. The extent to which subsequent policy work has furthered the search for greater ethical clarity over these difficult issues is discussed, together with reflection on three particular improvements that could be made to the process of such an inquiry. (+info)
Digital government and public health.
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Digital government is typically defined as the production and delivery of information and services inside government and between government and the public using a range of information and communication technologies. Two types of government relationships with other entities are government-to-citizen and government-to-government relationships. Both offer opportunities and challenges. Assessment of a public health agency's readiness for digital government includes examination of technical, managerial, and political capabilities. Public health agencies are especially challenged by a lack of funding for technical infrastructure and expertise, by privacy and security issues, and by lack of Internet access for low-income and marginalized populations. Public health agencies understand the difficulties of working across agencies and levels of government, but the development of new, integrated e-programs will require more than technical change - it will require a profound change in paradigm. (+info)
Mapping the literature of nursing: 1996-2000.
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INTRODUCTION: This project is a collaborative effort of the Task Force on Mapping the Nursing Literature of the Nursing and Allied Health Resources Section of the Medical Library Association. This overview summarizes eighteen studies covering general nursing and sixteen specialties. METHOD: Following a common protocol, citations from source journals were analyzed for a three-year period within the years 1996 to 2000. Analysis included cited formats, age, and ranking of the frequency of cited journal titles. Highly cited journals were analyzed for coverage in twelve health sciences and academic databases. RESULTS: Journals were the most frequently cited format, followed by books. More than 60% of the cited resources were published in the previous seven years. Bradford's law was validated, with a small core of cited journals accounting for a third of the citations. Medical and science databases provided the most comprehensive access for biomedical titles, while CINAHL and PubMed provided the best access for nursing journals. DISCUSSION: Beyond a heavily cited core, nursing journal citations are widely dispersed among a variety of sources and disciplines, with corresponding access via a variety of bibliographic tools. Results underscore the interdisciplinary nature of the nursing profession. CONCLUSION: For comprehensive searches, nurses need to search multiple databases. Libraries need to provide access to databases beyond PubMed, including CINAHL and academic databases. Database vendors should improve their coverage of nursing, biomedical, and psychosocial titles identified in these studies. Additional research is needed to update these studies and analyze nursing specialties not covered. (+info)
Mapping the literature of emergency nursing.
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PURPOSE: Emergency nursing covers a broad spectrum of health care from trauma surgery support to preventive health care. The purpose of this study is to identify the core literature of emergency nursing and to determine which databases provide the most thorough indexing access to the literature cited in emergency nursing journals. This study is part of the Medical Library Association's Nursing and Allied Health Resources Section's project to map the nursing literature. METHODS: Four key emergency nursing journals were selected and subjected to citation analysis based on Bradford's Law of Scattering. RESULTS: A group of 12 journals made up 33.3% of the 7,119 citations, another 33.3% of the citations appeared in 92 journals, with the remaining 33.3% scattered across 822 journals. Three of the core 12 journals were emergency medicine titles, and 2 were emergency nursing titles from the selected source journals. Government publications constituted 7.5% of the literature cited. CONCLUSIONS: PubMed/MEDLINE provided the best overall indexing coverage for the journals, followed by CINAHL. However, CINAHL provided the most complete coverage for the source journals and the majority of the nursing and emergency medical technology publications and should be consulted by librarians and nurses seeking emergency nursing literature. (+info)
Mapping the literature of nurse practitioners.
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OBJECTIVES: This study was designed to identify core journals for the nurse practitioner specialty and to determine the extent of their indexing in bibliographic databases. METHODS: 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. RESULTS: 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. CONCLUSION: 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. (+info)
Mapping the literature of nursing education.
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OBJECTIVES: 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. METHODS: 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. RESULTS: 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. CONCLUSIONS: 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. (+info)
Mapping the literature of pediatric nursing.
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BACKGROUND: Pediatric nurses work in an interdisciplinary field and face ever-increasing demands on their time and knowledge. Selection tools for librarians serving this group are available, but only one bibliometric analysis has examined citations to aid collection development. METHOD: The "Mapping the Literature of Nursing Project" protocol was used. Three source journals were selected, and a citation analysis of articles from 1998 to 2000 was conducted. RESULTS: The frequency of journal citation was tabulated, and a list of the most frequently cited journals was created. Just over 1% of the cited journals produced 33% of the citations. PubMed/MEDLINE, Science Citation Index, and Social Sciences Citation Index provided the most complete indexing coverage of all types of the journals, while CINAHL providing the most complete coverage of nursing journals. Books were the second-most frequently cited format. CONCLUSIONS: Citation analysis of journal articles from pediatric nursing journals may be helpful in selecting journals for libraries serving pediatric nurses and those who conduct pediatric nursing research. Librarians should consider adding indexes to their collection in addition to PubMed/MEDLINE to access the broad range of journals useful to this specialty. (+info)