Evaluation of Educational and Professional Information-Seeking Process and Its Related Barriers Among Nursing Students of Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences

Introduction: increasing information and recognizing its values in personal and professional life bring challenges and barriers for each person that how people can access to information and it is necessary for them to obtain some special skills in information-seeking process. this study aimed to examine information-seeking methods of nursing students of mazandaran university of medical sciences and to identify their barriers to access to information. methods: in this applied and descriptive cross-sectional study., statistical population included all 366 bachelor and master nursing students of mazandaran university of medical sciences (two faculties of nursing in sari and behshahr cities). to collect data, a researcher-made questionnaire was used, which had 5 sections including demographic information, motivations of information seeking, resources and channels of obtaining information and also barriers of access to information. the questionnaire distributed among all the students in 2016 and 310 ones, which answered completely, were analyzed. the data were analyzed using descriptive statistics by the spss software. results: results showed that the most important motivation of the students to access and search their own information was “performing their homework (educational activities)”. the results of this study showed that “books” and “journals” with averages of 4.10 and 3.91 and also “general searching engines such as google, yahoo, and msn” were identified as the most important resources and channels to access information. also, “university equipment problems” were mentioned by the nursing students as the most challenges in their information-seeking process. conclusions: this study shows that nursing students need to receive information from the formal and valid channels to increase the quality and quantity of suitable information, related to their personal, educational, and professional life. planning and making policy by management and masters of mazandaran university of medical sciences can be useful for student access to information by developing banks and channels of information.