Letters SEARCHING MEDLINE FOR NURSING LITERATURE To the Editor: A recent article by Hafner [1] ranked MEDLARS journal titles according to the number of articles published on (a) nursing as a profession, (b) nursing care, and (c) nursing educationf, by using three search strategies to query the MEDLARS data base for the four-year period from January 1972 through December 1975. I suspected that the strategy for the category NURSING EDUCATION (as shown in Hafner's Table 1) would bias the retrieval toward the titles in "Special List Nursing" (the journals in the International Nursing Index that are not in Index Medicus), since the term "Special List Nursing" was a prominent feature of the formulation, and would thus bias it against the journal titles in the List of Journals Indexed in Index Medicus (LJI) which were not also included in the strategy. To see if results were skewed against the Index Medicus nursing titles, I repeated the study by searching the MEDLARS files (via MEDLINE) for the same period (1972-1975), using the following formulation (which negated the part of Hafner's strategy not ANDed with "Special List Nursing"): SS 1 INSERVICE TRAINING OR ED SS 2 Journal title abbreviations for the thirteen titles found in the LJI under the subject heading NURSING SS 3 EXPLODE EDUCATION, NURSING OR STUDENTS, NURSING SS4 1AND2ANDNOT3 My suspicions were confirmed: the strategy retrieved 243 citations (from three to forty-nine for each of the thirteen LJI nursing journal titles), which, when added to the journal citation numbers in Table 4, altered the rankings for the following three titles: American Journal of Nursing, fortysix additional citations, from rank nine to six; Nursing Research, nine more citations, from rank twelve to ten; Journal of Nursing Education, five citations, from rank fourteen to thirteen. Without doing the entire search, I cannot predict whether Hafner's Table 5 (the composite list) would be changed significantly by these results. 396

This letter was written to show that the nursing titles in Index Medicus should be used as a search element for broad searches on nursing, especially when using the complementary journals group "Special List Nursing."

NANCY G. BLASE Seattle, Washington REFERENCE 1. HAFNER, ARTHUR W. Primary journal selection using citations from an indexing service journal: a method and example from nursing literature. Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 64: 392-40 1, Oct. 1976.

JOURNAL USAGE To the Editor: Lovisa Kamenoff in her article, "Journal usage at a community hospital library," (Bull. Med.

Libr. Assoc. 65: 58-61, 1977) gives the theory that A bridged Index Medicus (AIM) does not meet the needs of the practicing physician at Brockton Hospital. To support her thesis she cites a survey of journal usage which indicated that there was no significant correlation between journals requested and those indexed in AIM. There was a significant correlation, however, between journal usage and those which were available at the Brockton Hospital Library. This is not surprising; it is a fact which is duplicated at our hospital and I am sure at most other community hospitals. The user-whether it be intern, resident, attending physician, or even reference librarian-will first utilize those sources which are readily available, before seeking articles through interlibrary loan. Only when time permits or the essential sources are not available will ILL be utilized. This is simply human nature. Therefore I do not believe Kamenoff's premise is valid. She has not proven the lack of value of AIM but only that journals not located in her hospital are seldom requested. I believe a more positive correlation would result if all the journals indexed in AIM were in her collection. Conversely, fewer requests would be received for non-A IM journals if they were not available in her

library. Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 65(3)July 1977

Searching MEDLINE for nursing literature.

Letters SEARCHING MEDLINE FOR NURSING LITERATURE To the Editor: A recent article by Hafner [1] ranked MEDLARS journal titles according to the number o...
129KB Sizes 0 Downloads 0 Views