Brazilian nursing scientific production on violence, trends in the period of 2003 to april, 2008

Abstract

As a social problem, violence has been reflecting its consequences over people's daily lives. For such reason, it is important to understand how it is seen and addressed by health professionals, especially by nurses. It is therefore essential to study this issue by identifying and analyzing scientific paper on the theme. With this objective, we analyzed all Brazilian nursing scientific production on violence published in the period of 2003 to April, 2008. Articles from Biblioteca Virtual em Saúde / Biblioteca Regional de Medicina (BVS/BIREME) were accessed using LILACS, MEDLINE, SCIELO and BDENF database. We focused on methodology, Brazilian region where the study was performed, author's degree (professor, undergraduate or postgraduate student, assistant nurse), language, yearof publication, type of violence covered and publication vehicles. A total of 154 articles were found, out of which 47 were selected. Qualitative approaching was used in 33 papers (70, 2%). Seventeen studies (36, 2%) had been performed in the Southeast of Brazil, 32 (68, 1%) had been carried out by professors, 39 (83, 0%) were written in Portuguese and 22 (46, 8%) dealt with violence against children and teenagers. The publication that most frequently had articles on the subject was Revista Latino-Americana de Enfermagem, with a total of 10 papers (21,3%). We conclude that Brazilian scientific production on violence is still scarce, even though there has been a gradual increase in the studied period.