Informatics applying in nursing; education, research and care

Providing a comprehensive definition of nursing informatics and areas embracing it is essential for nurses, since according the given definition, nurses find their work's responsibilities and principles. Moreover, an accurate definition of nursing informatics specifies the position of this discipline for the other staffs of health-treatment group. The aim of this article is to introduce nursing informatics and its role in care, education and research areas. In order to find out the studies and resources related to nursing informatics, beside library study, Ovid, Proquest, Science direct and Pubmed and Jihad-e Daneshgahi's scientific information database (SID) were used. English articles search was done from 1976 to 2007 and Persian articles search was performed from 1986 to 2009 using some keywords including informatics, nursing informatics and information system. At the end, 42 articles and books were selected to review the texts in the field of nursing informatics. Scientific nursing informatics is a combination of the process of nursing and information pertinent to it, the management of nursing information and the other information processing. Nursing informatics is applicable in the care, education and research domains.