Systematic research literature review on community nursing for the elderly

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Objective To study the development and research progress of community nursing for the elderly, and provide a meaningful theoretical and practical reference. Methods A systematic literature review methods was adopted to collect, evaluate, and synthesize the research literatures on community nursing for the elderly, a database was setup using SPSS18.0 software. Analysis on the literatures published time trend,distribution of authors, journals, research topic, research methodology etc was carried out to provide an overall scan on the existing research literatures on community nursing for the elderly and look forward to put forward theoretical and practical references for researchers, policy - makers, and community nursing professionals. 494 original articles were searched preliminarily. In order to ensure accuracy of literatures and avoid the bias of unrelated literatures, we excluded literatures as follows: First, remove the notice of meeting, communication reports, call for papers, etc and only select academic research literature; second, eliminate duplications of one research paper to ensure that only copy was introduced into the analysis. Eventually 462 Chinese literatures were included. SPSS18.0 software was used to conduct descriptive and influencing factors analysis. Results The annual publications of the related literatures increased rapidly with the time. Most research subject was focused on consumers of the community nursing services, especially on the elderly and patients with chronic diseases.Majority of the literatures came from academic journals. The most research methodologies adopted by the literatures were cross - sectional survey and theoretical exploring discussion or literatures reviews. There was little even zero research literature on hospice services in community, which should be given more research attention in the future. Literatures citation and download frequency were analyzed. The influencing factors on the citation were associated with publishing time, academic level of journals published and research content.Publishing time was the negative factor and academic level of journals was a positive factors influencing on thecitation frequency of literature. Conclusions The numbers of elderly community nursing literature showed an increasing trend with the year, but imbalance existed in different research topics. Research on community hospices nursing, allocation on community nursing human resources, continues education, professional training,and qualification of community nurses, etc should be given more attention. High quality academic literature has more possibility published on core of dual - core journals. The academic journals was an important communication platform for research, they should also take active measures to encourage more health care workers and researchers to published high quality investigation and intervention research, and qualitative research, and timely report their research achievements, thereby to promote the development of community nursing research and practices. Key words: Community nursing for the elderly; Systematic literature review; Bibliometric analysis