Citation analysis of clinical nursing fund-sponsored theses published in 12 nursing core journals from 2015 to 2016

Objective To describe the situation of citation on clinical nursing fund-sponsored theses and to reflect the academic level in this field and authors' capability to using literature. Methods The way of search combining printed journal and database was used to clinical nursing fund-sponsored theses published in 12 nursing core journals from 2015 to 2016. Statistical analysis was conducted on the numbers, languages, subject resources and types of citations. Results There were total 3 590 clinical nursing fund-sponsored theses from 2015 to 2016. The citation rate was 99.78% with 14.58 per paper for the average number of citation. The languages of citations were main in Chinese accounting for 60.75%. The subject resources of citations mainly included nursing (55.36%) with clinical medicine and other subjects increasing. The types of citations of Chinese and foreign language primarily contained journals accounting for 87.33% and 96.33% respectively. Conclusions The numbers of citations and the average number of citations per paper increase year by year. The nurses' capability to absorb information grows continually. However, diversified investment funds for scientific research should be strengthened and resources sharing should be promoted in the future. Key words: Clinical nursing; Citation analysis; Fund-sponsored theses