The general purpose of Evidence-Based Nursing is to select from the health related literature those articles reporting studies and reviews that warrant immediate attention by nurses attempting to keep pace with important advances in their profession. These articles are summarised in “value added ” abstracts and commented on by clinical experts. The specific purposes of Evidence-Based Nursing are:

• To identify, using predefined criteria, the best quantitative and qualitative original and review articles on the meaning, cause, course, assessment, prevention, treatment, or economics of health problems managed by nurses and on quality assurance

• To summarise this literature in the form of “structured abstracts” that describe the question, methods, results, and evidence-based conclusions of studies in a reproducible and accurate fashion

• To provide brief, highly expert comment on the context of each article, its methods, and clinical applications that its findings warrant

• To disseminate the summaries in a timely fashion to nurses.

The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) Publishing Company and the British Medical Journal (BMJ) Publishing Group publish Evidence-Based Nursing under the editorship of Dr Alba DiCenso and Dr Donna Ciliska at McMaster University in Canada and Dr Nicky Cullum at the University of York in the UK. The Health Information Research Unit (HIRU) of the …