3. Discussion and conclusions
The results showed that there is a positive trend in the number of published papers per
year, indicating the increased research interest in nursing informatics competencies.
The drop in the trend in the last years in United States might be due to the fact that after
the health reforms the use of ICT by nurses became more or less a routine and as a
consequence nursing informatics competencies were also included in the required basic
nursing competencies and performance indicators sets. The positive trend in other
countries might reveal that other countries are still not there, but are following the US
example. Despite the fact that the first paper on nursing informatics competencies was
published in Denmark, the most prolific country regarding the research in nursing
informatics competencies is United States as are their institutions and authors. This
might be due to the fact, that the education in USA was always more competence
oriented than the outcome oriented curricula in the rest of the world, and additionally,
in US the ICT development and employment was more intense compared to other
countries. The last but not least, we can conclude that the bibliometrics is a promising
methodology for analyzing nursing research and that it revealed some interesting trends
and distribution patterns in nursing informatics competencies paper production.