Key research papers on evidence-based practice in nursing
EBP competencies, barriers and readiness surveys, and what educational interventions achieve: the most-cited research and search strings for nursing students.
Research on evidence-based practice (EBP) in nursing mostly asks why it is not happening. Pravikoff, Tanner and Pierce (2005) asked whether US nurses were prepared for it and found them more confident asking colleagues or searching the web than using bibliographic databases. Melnyk and colleagues followed with national surveys (2012), a competency framework (2014) and a study of competency deficits (2018). Barrier surveys from other countries are also listed. Newer work evaluates education and mentorship as remedies.
How the literature is organised
Pravikoff, Tanner and Pierce (2005) surveyed a stratified random sample of US registered nurses (1,097 respondents) about their access to tools for obtaining evidence and their skills in using them. Bernadette Melnyk and Ellen Fineout-Overholt's group then produced a sequence of studies: nurses' perceived knowledge, beliefs and needs (2004), the state of EBP among US nurses (2012), a consensus set of competencies (2014) and the first US study measuring those competencies (2018), in which nurses reported that they were not yet competent in any of the 24. Four of the ten most-cited foundational papers here have Melnyk as first author, and one journal, Worldviews on Evidence-Based Nursing, publishes far more of the most-cited work than any other outlet.
Alongside this sit measurement papers, above all Upton and Upton's questionnaire (2006), and descriptive surveys from individual hospitals and countries. Stevens (2013) reviews the impact of EBP in nursing and what she calls the next big ideas.
Main debates
The implicit debate is about where the problem lies. Some surveys point to individual knowledge and skills, such as the difficulty with statistics and research jargon in Majid et al. (2011). Others point to organisations: Brown et al. (2009) found lack of time and of nursing autonomy to be the top barriers. Kitson et al. (2021) studied how 55 nursing leaders in Australia, Canada, England and Sweden promote implementation at the point of care, and Melnyk et al. (2021) report that EBP culture and mentorship predict implementation, job satisfaction and intent to stay. Note that most of these studies rest on nurses' own reports.
Where recent work is heading
Recent reviews test whether education changes anything. Portela Dos Santos et al. (2022) and Sapri et al. (2022) review educational interventions for nurses, and Cardoso et al. (2021) and Jeong et al. (2024) evaluate programmes for undergraduate students. Furuki, Sonoda and Morimoto (2023) scope the factors related to EBP knowledge and skills worldwide.
Most-cited foundational papers
Published before 2021 and ranked by how often later work cites them. Read the abstract of each and the full text of the three or four closest to your question. Citation count measures attention, not quality, so treat this as a map of what the field has argued about rather than a ranking of what is true.
Kathleen Stevens (2013). OJIN: The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing.
Cited by 307doi:10.3912/ojin.vol18no02man04
Most-cited papers since 2021
Primary studies and conceptual papers from 2021 onwards. A paper published in 2024 has had a few years to accumulate citations where the works in the section above have had decades, so compare these counts with each other rather than with the ones above.
Jamaan M. Alqahtani and 5 others (2022). Nursing Reports.
Cited by 55Open accessdoi:10.3390/nursrep12020031
Recent reviews and meta-analyses
The fastest way into a literature. A good review gives you the structure of the field, a reference list to mine and, in its limitations section, the gaps other researchers have already spotted.
Dain Jeong and 5 others (2024). International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
Cited by 35Open accessdoi:10.3390/ijerph21050637
How big the literature is, and where it is published
OpenAlex indexes 3,387 works whose title matches this topic. The chart shows how many were published each year from 2000 to 2025; the current year is left out because it is incomplete.
Show the numbers as a table
Year
Works
2000
14
2001
14
2002
18
2003
24
2004
26
2005
45
2006
32
2007
44
2008
76
2009
94
2010
128
2011
127
2012
154
2013
162
2014
165
2015
195
2016
205
2017
236
2018
218
2019
185
2020
232
2021
172
2022
101
2023
129
2024
185
2025
190
Journals behind the most-cited work
Counted across the 350 most-cited works on the topic, not across everything published. Browsing recent issues of the first two or three is a reliable way to find current work that has not yet been cited much.
Worldviews on Evidence-Based Nursing62 papers
Nurse Education Today24 papers
Journal of Advanced Nursing19 papers
BMC Nursing17 papers
Journal of Clinical Nursing14 papers
Journal of Nursing Management13 papers
Nurse Education in Practice10 papers
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health8 papers
Search strings to copy
Written for databases that accept Boolean operators (Scopus, Web of Science, ERIC, PubMed, EBSCO). Quotation marks keep a phrase together, an asterisk stands in for the end of a word, and OR groups go in brackets. British and American spellings are written out with OR rather than covered by a single-character wildcard, because those wildcards differ between databases: PubMed’s help page documents the asterisk only, and asks for at least four characters before it. Limit the search to title and abstract first; widen it only if you get too little. Our guide to starting a literature review covers how to record what you searched.
Barriers and facilitators
("evidence-based practice" OR "evidence-based nursing" OR "research utilisation" OR "research utilization") AND (nurs*) AND (barrier* OR facilitator* OR attitude* OR belief*)
Education and competence
("evidence-based practice") AND (nurs*) AND (education OR training OR curriculum OR competenc*) AND (student* OR "educational intervention*")
Leadership and organisational culture
("evidence-based practice") AND (nurs*) AND (leadership OR mentor* OR "organisational culture" OR "organizational culture" OR readiness)
Explore evidence-based practice in nursing in Wonders →Opens Wonders on this question. Once you are signed in it becomes a project with suggested sub-topics and keywords you can edit before searching. The trial is 14 days.
Sub-topics to narrow into
A thesis-sized question usually sits inside one of these, combined with a population or a setting.
Readiness, beliefs and barriers
Pravikoff, Tanner and Pierce (2005), Brown et al. (2009) and Majid et al. (2011) are the most-cited surveys.
Competencies
Melnyk et al. (2014) defined competencies for registered and advanced practice nurses; Doležel et al. (2021) did the same for Europe.
Measurement instruments
Upton and Upton (2006) developed the Evidence-Based Practice Questionnaire used in many later surveys.
Teaching EBP
Several recent reviews assess educational interventions for students and practising nurses.
Melnyk et al. (2021) link EBP culture and mentorship with implementation, job satisfaction and retention.
How to cite these papers
Every paper above has a DOI, a part of the reference that is easy to leave out. Here is one of them, “Readiness of U.S. Nurses for Evidence-Based Practice” (2005), in the two styles students ask about most:
APA 7th edition
Pravikoff, D. S., Tanner, A. B., & Pierce, S. T. (2005). Readiness of U.S. nurses for evidence-based practice. AJN, American Journal of Nursing, 105(9), 40–51. https://doi.org/10.1097/00000446-200509000-00025
MLA 9th edition
Pravikoff, Diane S., et al. “Readiness of U.S. Nurses for Evidence-Based Practice.” AJN, American Journal of Nursing, vol. 105, no. 9, 2005, pp. 40–51, https://doi.org/10.1097/00000446-200509000-00025.
Check the details against the article itself before you submit: databases, including the one behind this page, sometimes carry the online-first year rather than the volume year. Full rules and more examples are in our guides to APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, Vancouver and ABNT, with the rest in the citation guides. You can also format a reference from its DOI with our free citation tools.
Frequently asked questions
Why is this literature smaller than the others on this site?
OpenAlex indexes about 3,400 works with both evidence-based practice and a nursing term in the title, and annual output peaked around 2017. Much relevant work uses other words, such as research utilisation, knowledge translation or implementation science. Add those terms if your search returns too little.
Which barriers to EBP do studies find most often?
Lack of time comes first in both of the most-cited barrier surveys. Brown et al. (2009), at an academic medical centre, found organisational barriers on top: lack of time and lack of nursing autonomy. Majid et al. (2011), with 1,486 nurses in two public hospitals in Singapore, found the top three to be lack of time, inability to understand statistical terms and inadequate understanding of research jargon. Alqahtani et al. (2022) apply the BARRIERS scale to primary healthcare nurses in Saudi Arabia.
Where do the EBP models such as Iowa or ARCC fit in?
Works about a named model do not surface in a title search for evidence-based practice unless the phrase is in their title. Melnyk et al. (2021), listed here, tests relationships among components of the ARCC model; follow its references for that model, and search for the others by name.
How this page was made
The lists come from OpenAlex, an open index of scholarly works whose data are published under a CC0 licence, queried on September 21, 2026 for works whose title matches ("evidence-based practice" AND (nurse OR nurses OR nursing)). Only works with a DOI are listed. Each one was checked against the publisher’s own record at Crossref or DataCite (title, year, first author, journal, volume and pages), and in three cases, where the publisher deposited no byline, against PubMed; anything OpenAlex or Crossref flags as retracted was left out, and an editor took out results that matched the words but not the subject. Citation counts are OpenAlex’s on that date and are usually lower than Google Scholar’s, which counts more kinds of document. Ranking by citations tells you what a field has relied on, not what is correct; several heavily cited papers on any topic are cited because later work disputes them. Books without a DOI are missing, which matters in fields where the founding text is a book.
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