>Objectives: As part of a project to map the literature of nursing, sponsored by the Nursing and Allied Health Resources Section of the Medical Library Association, this study identifies core journals cited by general or “popular” US nursing journals and the indexing services that cover the cited journals.>Methods: Three journals were selected for analysis: American Journal of Nursing, Nursing 96–98, and RN. The source journals were subjected to a citation analysis of articles from 1996 to 1998, followed by an analysis of database access to the most frequently cited journal titles.>Results: Cited formats included journals (63.7%), books (26.6%), government documents (3.0%), Internet (0.5%), and miscellaneous (6.2%). Cited references were relatively current; most (86.6%) were published in the current decade. One-third of the citations were found in a core of 24 journal titles; one-third were dispersed among a middle zone of 94 titles; and the remaining third were scattered in a larger zone of 694 titles. Indexing coverage for the core titles was most comprehensive in PubMed/MEDLINE, followed by CINAHL and Science Citation Index.>Conclusions: Results support the popular (not scholarly) nature of these titles. While not a good source for original research, they fulfill a key role of disseminating nursing knowledge with their relevantly current citations to a broad variety of sources.
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