This study of the public health nursing literature is part of the Nursing and Allied Health Resources section of the Medical Library Association's project to map the literature of nursing [5], patterned after the effort to map the literature of allied health [6]. The details of the study's methodology and inferences based on data supplied from this study appear in the overview article published in the April 2006 issue of the Journal of the Medical Library Association [7]. No similar studies of the public health nursing literature appear to have been published. The public health nursing literature was briefly characterized in a paper by Ada M. Carr on the development of public health nursing literature in 1926; this paper was reprinted in 1988 in Public Health Nursing [8].