Nursing and information : journal of the Japan Nursing Library Association

Development of information technology has enabled end users to access and search reference databases directly. As the end users have changed, the search function in the reference databases has adapted to accommodate the searching behavior of medical professionals, health care professionals, and of course ordinary people. Some of the keywords of this trend are "up-to-date", "retroactive", "easy-to-use", and :diverse." Librarians are required to have an understanding of not only reference databases, but also nursing literature. In addition they need to have knowledge of the evolution of scientific information, publishing distribution, and research methodology. Another area where they need to demonstrate competence is in their understanding about the needs and characteristics of their users. In the process of considering an effective search strategy for their users, the librarians should have the ability to understand the background to the search, and clarify this in the reference interview. They should then carefully arrange the search results in an easily understood form.

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Library users are usually expected to search electronically-stored publication databases by themselves, because it seems to be a simple task. However, there can be great differences in the success of a search depending on the retrieving skills of the inquirer. PubMed is popular with Japanese researchers because it is a huge resource of literature published overseas, but a knowledge of how to use it effectively is required to obtain appropriate literature. For example, techniques such as limiting the search to only the most prominent publications, searching by author name, or using functions such as MeSH, MyNCBI, and email notifications can be of benefit. In particular, if you register with PubMed, you can use the MyNCBI's Save Search and Email Alert Service and you can later be informed by email of any new publications matching your search. Thus, MyNCBI is an excellent tool to enable researchers to be kept up-to-date with their areas of interest. It is important that teaching staff, and field-specific librarians, give support to nursing students by making them aware of the different search methods available, and of quality publications.

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The Cochrane Library established by the Cochrane Collaboration Plan is a database effective for retrieving EBM literature, and is composed of seven databases by means of systematic review. Our undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers mainly use it to learn about the latest developments in medical treatment, and to confirm current research trends. I explain and comment on the CL retrieval method in this article.

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The purpose of this study is to investigate the number of English nursing articles written and published in Japan and to realize the needs of English literacy among nursing scholars. The data were first searched based on nursing literature indices entitled Saishin kango sakuin from 1999 to 2003, and collected to confirm authors, language, and the type of the articles. As a result, in 2000 while the number of nursing graduate schools was gradually increasing, the largest number of English research articles seemed to be published. Also most of the journals in which English articles were published were in-house journals of each university and the ones published by each academic organization. Most notably, in five years from 1999 to 2003, the range of research themes was expanded greatly, which suggests the development of nursing academic fields must have taken place. with the importance of publication in English in nursing fields, we propose nursing libraries to collect basic guidebooks or manuals for writing English articles as well as to enrich digitalized data base for swift literature search of English.

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