Helen Hamilton

Reviewing the literature: making 'the literature' work for you

Whilst there are numerous texts that describe the mechanics of a literature review, few discuss the demands of scholarship that are required for an authentic, credible and relevant literature review for research purposes. This paper focuses on the writing-up phase of the literature review and discusses the characteristics of a review that reflect its integrity and confirm the writers authority as an authentic and trustworthy scholar. The characteristics inherent in a quality literature review are described as: explication, verification, integration and attribution. Writing a literature review may seem a daunting task yet with careful consideration of the purpose of the review and organisation of articles and reports it is a very useful and satisfying strategy. This paper provides essential background for this important component of research.

National Federation Biographical Nursing Project

In honour of the Centenary of Federation, The Australian Nursing History Project (ANHP), based at the School of Postgraduate Nursing, The University of Melbourne, is aiming to place 50 nurses on the popular Bright Spares bio-bibliographic database and to begin a comprehensive register of Australian nursing organisations, past and present, including informal groups. The popular databases of the Australian Science, Technology and Heritage Centre receive up to 500,000 hits in a week-mainly from secondary school students. Currently there is only a small number of nurses listed on Bright Spares and few nursing organisations documented on the Australian Science at Work database. The ANHP aims to create an information resource on the history of nursing, freely accessible to all via the internet, through the development of a biographical database of individual nurses as part of the Bright Spares database and through the inclusion of nursing organisations on the Australian Science at Work register. These databases will include information about the life and work of individual nurses, the location of relevant archival material, photographs and published material. In addition to the databases, exhibitions with a broad appeal to students will be mounted on a wide variety of aspects of nursing such as ‘nurses at war’ or ‘nurses and medications’. This article explains why this is an important initiative and how nurses, nursing groups or others with an interest in nursing, can participate and develop resources on nursing history.