Information‐searching behaviors of main and allied health professionals: a nationwide survey in Taiwan

Abstract

This national survey depicts the information-searching pattern of various health professionals. There were significant differences between and within main and allied health professionals in their information searching. The data provide clinical implications for strategies to promote the accessing of evidence-based information.

Hospital nurses’ information retrieval behaviours in relation to evidence based nursing: a literature review

“…Searches made in Google, or similar search engines, are mentioned in eight of the nine studies, (Baro & Ebhomeya, ; Chiu et al., ; Kumaran & Chipanshi, ; Miller, Graves, Jones, & Sievert, ; Muallem, ; Ross, ; Wahoush & Banfield, ; Weng et al., ) representing a total of 6572 respondents. The studies conclude that the majority of the nurses use Google to search for information, including evidence based and health information.…”

“…Among the bibliographic databases, PubMed or MEDLINE is the most frequently used and included in seven of the nine studies (Chiu et al., ; Hunt, Cimino, & Koziol, ; Miller et al., ; Muallem, ; Ross, ; Wahoush & Banfield, ; Weng et al., ) representing 6429 respondents. Three of the studies reported percentages on the use of PubMed or MEDLINE.…”

“…CINAHL is a bibliographic database containing nursing and allied health journals, and was included in five of the nine studies (Chiu et al., ; Muallem, ; Ross, ; Wahoush & Banfield, ; Weng et al., ) representing 6187 respondents. In the Chiu study from Taiwan (Chiu et al., ), 36.2% of the respondents retrieved information in CINAHL, while in the Ross study from the United States (Ross, ), no exact numbers were reported, but 11% answered that they were partly successful when searching in CINAHL.…”

“…Four of the studies have included various other databases: Cochrane, MD Consult, Micromedex, ProQuest and UpToDate (Chiu et al., ; Hunt et al., ; Muallem, ; Weng et al., ). Only one study (Chiu et al., ) reports statistics on these databases, and the authors found that 29.6% of the respondents used Cochrane; 27.9% used MD Consult; 31.9% used ProQuest and 31.3% used UpToDate.…”

Increasing utilization of Internet-based resources following efforts to promote evidence-based medicine: a national study in Taiwan

“…In addition, our study demonstrated that the increased usage of online database was proportional to that of Web portals. We found the majority of physicians and nurses used the online database for self-learning or clinical practice [28,29]. However, we did not know why they accessed the Web portals.…”