Evidence-based nursing outputs and hot spot analysis of the last 5 years in mainland China: Results of a bibliometric analysis.

Background: Evidence-based nursing has been highlighted and highly developed in recent decades in mainland China. Nevertheless, little is known about its overall development.

Aims: To gain insights on the overall development of evidence-based nursing in the most recent 5 years and to inform future evidence-based nursing research in mainland China.

Method: Four Chinese and four English databases were searched with the search terms "evidence-based practice," "nurse or nursing," and "China or Chinese" from 2012 to 2016. Bibliometric and co-word cluster analysis were conducted with the final included publications.

Results: A total of 9036 papers published by 13 808 authors in 606 journals were included. Publication numbers were increasing. None of the top ten journals publishing evidence-based nursing papers were core nursing journals. The research hot spots on evidence-based nursing in the recent five years were cardiovascular disease, mental health, and complication prevention. However, little attention has been paid to education for evidence-based nursing.

Conclusion: Evidence-based nursing has penetrated into various nursing branches in mainland China and become a well-recognized and relatively mature research domain. More importance should be attached to the study design, methodological, and reporting quality of evidence-based nursing projects.