Enhancing evidence-based practice--a controlled vocabulary for nursing practice and research.

Evidence-based practice requires flexible systems for information retrieval. Search processes in electronic databases must be based on terms, which are familiar to professionals and describe accurately the problem to be solved. The paper describes the process of evolving a controlled nursing vocabulary for indexing and information retrieval purposes. The vocabulary is based on terms of the Medline thesaurus the medical subject headings (MeSH) by National Library of Medicine and the International Classification for Nursing Practice by the International Council of Nurses. The created vocabulary consists of 10 themes central to nursing domain. The content was compiled using Delphi technique. The expert panel had four rounds and at the first stage the vocabulary consists of 558 terms. The validity of the vocabulary has been tested for indexing nursing research and based on the validation the expert panel has made some changes for the hierarchy and content. The vocabulary will be added as an independent theme to the Finnish thesaurus the FinMeSH.