Abstract
Advances in bibliometrics and co-citation analysis provide the opportunity to analyze quantitatively the large amount of nursing research used in evidence-based nursing. Numerous nursing researchers have attempted to obtain evidence that using evidence-based nursing improves the quality of nursing practices. However, little is known about how these efforts comply with the rigorous methods required for a systematic review in a subject area. This study explored the comprehensiveness of systematic reviews in four guidelines for preventing inpatient falls using bibliometrics and a co-citation network technique. Citations (n = 659) and 9417 unique bibliographic records written by 6537 authors were collected from the guidelines in January 2020. The results showed none of the references spanned all four authoring bodies, whereas only 0.1% and 4.7% of the references spanned three and two of the authoring bodies, respectively. The co-citation analysis revealed differences in the scope and primary concerns among the development groups, even in the same setting, with differences in the highly influential articles and authors. These findings imply that although the systematic reviews of guidelines on fall prevention were of good quality, there remain areas for improvement in terms of harmonizing the selection of bibliographic citations comprehensively.