In the 1960s and 1970s, standards were developed for many nursing specialties, including medical-surgical nursing. While the integration of this approach into nursing school curricula was slow, by the 1960s, nursing schools emphasized the interdisciplinary study and practice of medical and surgical nursing. Students were expected to learn not only the theory and treatment of abnormal physiological conditions, but also to provide total care of the patient by understanding the role of health promotion and the psychological, social, and physical aspects that affected a patient's health. The NLNE's 1937 guide called for a “Combined Course” of medical and surgical nursing. Surgical nursing came to be seen as the care of medical patients who were being treated surgically. īy the 1930s, however, advocates recommended that medical and surgical nursing be taught in a single, interdisciplinary course, because the division of the two was considered an artificial distinction. Early National League of Nursing Education (NLNE) curriculum guides treated medical nursing, surgical nursing, and disease prevention (incorporating personal hygiene and public sanitation) as separate topics. Nursing education in hospital training schools reflected these divisions to prepare nurses for work on these units. They also may pursue certification at the basic and advanced levels.ĭuring the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States, adult patients in many of the larger hospitals were typically assigned to separate medical, surgical, and obstetrical wards. Medical-surgical or adult health nurses may pursue advanced degrees and practice as clinical nurse specialists, nurse practitioners, and researchers. Comprehensive, total patient care, rather than a focus on a particular organ system or problem, is an important aspect of this specialty. “The care provided is holistic and is rooted in health promotion, disease prevention, and health maintenance” and may be carried out in community and institutional settings. Medical-surgical nurses, also known as adult health nurses, specialize in the care of adults with a “known or predicted physiological alteration”. Database producers will also benefit in having documented evidence regarding titles to select for indexing. It will also aid researchers by providing guidelines for selecting databases to search. Results of this research should assist librarians in selection decisions for both journals and databases. Using the common project methodology described in the general overview article, the study attempts to determine the core literature in medical-surgical nursing by applying Bradford's Law of Scattering to a citation analysis of representative medical-surgical journals and to examine the depth of coverage by bibliographic databases. This study is part of Phase I of a project to map the literature of nursing, sponsored by the Nursing and Allied Health Resources Section of the Medical Library Association. Indexes in addition to PubMed/MEDLINE are necessary to provide access to the journal literature serving this specialty. Books were the second-most cited format.Ĭonclusions: Citation analysis of journal articles is a useful aid for selecting journals for medical-surgical nursing collections, but it did not prove to be as useful for selecting materials in other formats. PubMed/MEDLINE, CINAHL, and Science Citation Index provided the most complete indexing coverage of all of the journals, with CINAHL providing the most complete coverage of nursing journals. The list demonstrates that 1.2% of the cited medical-surgical nursing journals produced just over 33% of the citations. Results: A list of the most frequently cited journals was created, using Bradford's Law of Scattering. Four source journals were selected, and a citation analysis of articles from 1996 to 1998 was conducted.

Method: The Mapping the Literature of Nursing Project protocol was used. While one bibliometric study of journals exists, no recent work had been done in this area. Several excellent qualitative aids exist for collection development for this field, but quantitative studies are few. Background: Medical-surgical or adult health nursing is a complex specialty that requires a wide-ranging literature to inform its research and practice.

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