Mapping the literature of public health and community nursing.

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to identify the journals most cited in public health and community nursing and to determine which databases provide the most thorough indexing access to these journals. This study is part of the Medical Library Association Nursing and Allied Health Resource Section's project to map the nursing literature.

Methods: Two source journals of public health nursing, Public Health Nursing and Journal of Community Health Nursing, were subjected to citation analysis based on Bradford's Law of Scattering.

Results: A group of 18 titles comprised 34% (1,387) of the 4,100 citations, another third were dispersed among 104 journal titles, with the remaining third scattered across 703 journal titles. The core 18 journals included both of the source journals, 3 major public health journals, and several general medical and nursing journals.

Conclusions: PubMed provided the best overall indexing coverage for the journals, followed by Social Science Citation Index and CINAHL. In terms of source journal coverage, several databases provided complete coverage for the journal Public Health Nursing, while only EMBASE provided complete coverage for the Journal of Community Health Nursing.