Abstract:

The study was carried out to determine nursing students’ usage of scientific knowledge. This was a descriptive study carried out by a sample of 443 students studying in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grades of a nursing undergraduate program. Study data were collected through the “Student Questionnaire” and analyzed by means of frequency distributions and chi-square test. It was determined that nursing students mostly utilized powerpoint presentations (60.3%), electronic/printed journals (52.1%), and books (51.2%) for collecting scientific information. They generally used google academy (80.8%) and the university library catalog (56.9%) while doing research. The majority of the students (82.4%) reported that they were not specifically trained for data searching, while 60.7% noted that they required educational support for literature review. They searched articles primarily by the titles (79.9%), reading the conclusion (48.3%), and abstract (45.1%) parts of the articles, at most. There was a statistically significant difference between being educated for data searching and requiring education for data searching with respect to gender and grade variables (p<0.05). There was also a statistically significant relationship between the variable of desire for doing a postgraduate education and academic career and the variable of need for data search and literature review (p<0.05).As a result, nursing students collect scientific information from various sources (powerpoint, journals, books, etc.). However, the level of attainment is not satisfactory in terms of using scientific information, and thus students need to be educated to access the scientific information.

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