ILISI® digital index of the Italian scientific literature of nursing

Summary ASVI Rome Nursing Board–Centre of Excellence–began the project of building a free accessed database, Ilisi®, where the main Italian nursing and health-related journals could be consulted (including the few peer reviewed, at international level, Italian journals of nursing). Today, it includes the abstracts of more than 2700 articles from 2004 of about 25 Italian journals of nursing and/or related to nursing disciplines. The Ilisi® project has got with Thisi–Italian thesaurus of nursing science–a controlled vocabulary specifically built for nursing science, its tool of feasibility. This project was developed to foster nursing scholarship in Italy and to offer a free controlled database for all stakeholders (students, nurses, other health professionals, and scholars). The abstracts of the articles of these Italian journals are a tool for lifelong learning and constitute a patrimony for nursing science even at a wider level if this patrimony could be translated in English that will be a further step of the project. oject group who developed this database is going to value Italian nursing literature production and implement an electronic tool that, in the near future, might be used by all students and healthcare professionals in the world. Besides, with this project scientific productions by Italian students, nurses could be encouraged. More of them need to be trained in the use of the most frequently used databases, and Ilisi® could be a good training experience for them.