Why Do Nurses Utilize Textual Knowledge Sources at Work‪?‬

Introduction Nurses, both on an individual basis as well as in collaboration with colleagues, have traditionally been responsible for establishing and securing the standards of good nursing practice (1). This responsibility emerges from a mandate given by society (2). Rapid changes and specialization in today's hospitals call for high skilled performance among nurses. Even though nurses find themselves in pressured work situations in hospitals, they still express an obligation to do their work in a quality-conscious way (3,4,5). According to Byrnes and West (6) nurses in today's society are expected to deal with an increasing body of scientific, technical and professional knowledge in addition to meeting patient's needs. Working with different patient groups and levels of responsibility requires that nurses keep up with changing knowledge demands and embrace the notion of continuous learning (7). Despite calls to increase the use of research in nursing, individual as well as organizational determinants seem to create some barriers in this area (8,9,10). In relation to knowledge translation initiatives in health care environments, Estabrooks et al.(11) view knowledge utilization as a more common term than either research implementation or knowledge translation.