New nurses apply only basic source evaluation criteria but realize their skills are lacking: More sophisticated approaches to teaching evaluation skills are required

Abstract

Background: While information evaluation is an essential component of evidence based practice, it remains unclear how nurses perceive their own source evaluation skills and what evaluation criteria they typically apply.Objectives: This study aims to determine nurses' self-reported confidence in their evaluation skills and their actual source evaluation ability. The findings will guide information literacy instruction. Methods:A questionnaire asked recently graduated nurses from four institutions in the Intermountain West (USA) to rate their confidence in evaluating information and to provide examples of evaluation criteria they typically applied.The quality of these criteria was rated by nursing librarians, then compared with reported confidence in evaluation, years employed as a nurse and highest degree level.Results: While nurses' self-reported confidence levels about source evaluation largely matched their ability, their evaluation criteria showed a low level of sophistication and did not match the recommended criteria by professional organizations. Graduate education, not years of work experience, was predictive of the quality of criteria used by nurses, suggesting the importance of more instruction on source evaluation for nursing students.Conclusions: Nursing educators, including librarians, need to teach evaluation skills at the undergraduate level. Further investigation into building evaluation skills in nurses is warranted.

Making the most of public policy in health libraries and information services: Example of the Health and Care Bill 2022

“…The authors conclude by advocating for academic libraries to develop roles for data librarians to help train researchers in the processes required for safe data preparation for sharing. A questionnaire survey was also used by Schvaneveldt et al (2022) of the self‐assessed levels of confidence of recently graduated nurses in evaluating information. While nurses' confidence levels about source evaluation largely matched their ability, findings indicated that they apply only basic source evaluation criteria that did not match the recommended criteria by professional organisations.…”