Health Care Providers' Information Seeking

Recent research studies describe typical information-seeking behavior of doctors, nurses, and other health care providers. This review identifies and analyzes thirty-nine studies and nine reviews published since 1990. The researchers are from many disciplines and often work in multi-disciplinary teams. They have used both quantitative and qualitative methods to gather self-report and observational data. In spite of the increased availability of online bibliographic and full-text sources in this decade, health care providers are using the same sources they used twenty years ago. Self-report studies usually show a higher use of published literature than of advice from colleagues; observational studies usually show the opposite.