Publications by authors named "Mark A Spasser"

Objective: This paper describes a citation analysis of the literature of rehabilitation nursing, conducted as part of the Medical Library Association's Nursing and Allied Health Section's the "Mapping the Literature of Nursing Project."

Methods: One core journal, Rehabilitation Nursing, was selected, being both the official journal of the Association of Rehabilitation Nurses and the only journal devoted exclusively to rehabilitation nursing. Citations were analyzed according to format and date and stratified according to Bradford's Law of Scattering.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Searching for information on the Web is paradoxically easy but frustrating. There is an increasingly vast amount of high-quality information available on the Internet, but finding it can seem like groping through the world's largest haystack for the proverbial needle. This review discusses some of the most basic and important methods and techniques, (table 1) applicable to almost any search using almost any search engine, whose thoughtful application ensures that the information found is both high-quality and relevant.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Evidence-based medicine and, more generally, evidence-based practice (EBP), is the integration of the best available patient care evidence and clinical expertise-guided by and sensitized to patient values-into a patient-oriented decision-making process. It is increasingly clear that all health professions neither equally value nor draw upon the same pool of evidence. Although there are areas of overlap between evidence-based nursing and medicine, for example, there are important differences as well.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objectives: Difficulties encountered in the retrieval of evidence-based nursing (EBN) literature and recognition of terminology, research focus, and design differences between evidence-based medicine and nursing led to the realization that nursing needs its own filter strategies for evidence-based practice. This article describes the development and evaluation of filters that facilitate evidence-based nursing searches.

Methods: An inductive, multistep methodology was employed.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The Web continues to grow in a largely unregulated manner. It is an established role of health sciences librarians to assist busy clinicians and other health care professionals cope with "information overload" by helping them locate useful and valuable information resources. One time-honored means of doing so is to prepare annotated bibliographies of such resources, perhaps no more so than to manage such cross-disciplinary topics as writing for publication.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF