The Association of College and Research Libraries, professional accrediting bodies, and regional accreditors place a premium on the development of library and online research skills for students in nursing and the allied health disciplines. Today's health care professionals must be information literate, having the necessary skills to effectively locate, retrieve, evaluate, and use information. Librarians and other faculty must partner to ensure students learn these skills while building a desire for lifelong learning. Pathways to Nursing: A Guide to Library and Online Research in Nursing and Allied Health attempts to “provide instruction for doing research in the area [sic] of nursing and allied health sciences” (p. vii) for nursing students and working professionals. The authors provide direction for the research process focusing on the library as a physical space, the catalog, reference works, periodicals and indexes, electronic resources, and the Internet and finally providing guidance on writing research papers. The “Electronic Resources and the Internet” chapter lays out essential issues for any researcher attempting to use the open Web. It provides sound guidelines for evaluating the quality of information, explains the different types of search engines, and provides strategies for identifying useful Websites. It contains useful information for any person attempting to use the Internet to do serious research yet makes unfortunately few connections to nursing and allied health research. Although a careful reader can glean useful insights, on balance, the book is not relevant to researchers in nursing and virtually ignores research issues in the allied health sciences. Much of the text seems out of touch with the current state of libraries and information technology. For example, its ninety pages include four pages devoted to the card catalog. Although the authors attempt to demystify the Library of Congress system and the Dewey Decimal System, they make only a passing reference to the National Library of Medicine classification system. Because nursing and allied health research relies heavily on the journal literature, the “Periodicals and Indexes” chapter is among the most important. It includes descriptions of relevant resources such as CINAHL, MEDLINE/ PubMed, and the Annual Review of Nursing Research. The brief description of CINAHL fails to mention many of the indexed allied health disciplines and other useful features in the database such as the full-text state nursing journals, citation indexing, and quality filters. A number of the recommended indexes are of limited value to the intended audience, including Biography Index, Current Book Review Citations (covering 1976–1982), Essay and General Literature Index, Humanities Index, and the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. The guidelines for writing research papers explain topic formulation, information retrieval, and the writing process. The authors present a tried-and-true method for creating, cataloging, and organizing index cards, which might seem dated to many of today's computer savvy students. The appendix provides an extensive list of print and electronic resources related to nursing and other non–health sciences topics. Many of the nursing resources are worthwhile, including suggested indexes, periodicals, style guides, Websites, dictionaries, and other reference works; however, the list includes no allied health resources. The eclectic mix of recommended Websites ranges from the highly relevant National League for Nursing and Hardin Meta Directory to others of lesser importance for health sciences researchers such as the Internet Movie Database and the Semantic Rhyming Dictionary. The extensive list of document delivery providers would be useful to librarians attempting to identify highly specialized research support services. Overall, a number of the uniform resource locators (URLs) for listed Websites are no longer current, and two of the books are out of date. Rather than purchase this book, most libraries would be better served buying a more general nursing research guide, such as Notter's Essentials of Nursing Research [1], and supplement it by partnering with faculty to create instruction sessions, pathfinders, and other tools to support student research efforts.
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Open Access
Jan 1, 2008
Algirdas Laukaitis + 1
