Objectives: To provide the most up to date information on nursing and the novel coronavirus and comparisons to historical pandemics, nurse researchers and a librarian at Children’s Hospital Colorado abstracted literature around COVID-19 specific to nursing from two established literature databases, the LitCOVID and CORD-19. Abstracting the key information from these database as well as abstracts, they created a repository that utilized text mining to summarize the literature providing improved accessibility to the literature for nurses.
Methods: To accomplish the stated objective, two databases, the CORD-19 and LitCOVID were searched using keywords ‘nurse’ or ‘nursing’ to search for publications around COVID-19 applicable to nursing. The two databases were searched daily to see what new publications have appeared. Information such as the title, authors, journal, and abstract are gathered and added to the regularly updated data set for the repository. This in turn is examined by a nurse scientist who incorporated data mining and natural language techniques to analyze the abstracts. A searchable application has been created to allow nurses to access this information.
Results: The repository was created and deployed on May 2020. To date there are 2179 articles around COVID-19 and historical epidemics applicable to nursing within the repository. As of December 2020, it has been used 1441 times at about 2 hours per week. An analysis of 770 articles in July revealed that the nursing literature focused much on the psychological status and care of health care workers as well as the need for rapid education. Further, other themes included nursing delivery changes in the light of the challenges of the large numbers of patients and new precautions needed.
Conclusions: The repository highlighted an important and useful tool to support for nurses in accessing relevant literature. Nurses primary responsibility is on the bedside and having a literature resource allows them to quickly obtain needed information to support evidence-based practice., Other repositories could be created in the future for other topics of interest to nursing, or other health professions. Librarians can help in planning which databases and information will be needed for individualizing such repositories, and in gathering the data. The partnership between nurse scientist and librarian is highlighted in this work.