Barriers to Research Utilization in Nursing: A Systematic Review (2002–2021)

INTRODUCTION: There is an existing gap between what people learned from theory and what they clinically practiced, as revealed in research studies in nursing. This gap is primarily due to identified barriers in utilizing the research findings in actual nursing practice. OBJECTIVE: To present a scientific mapping of the Scopus-indexed literature published from 2002 to 2021, which studied barriers to research utilization in nursing using the BARRIER scale. METHODS: This systematic review utilized bibliometric analysis. One hundred seventy-nine extracted literature from Scopus was manually reviewed, and the study included 53 documents for further analysis. RESULTS: Remarkably, almost three-fourths of the documents identified setting-related factors as the most common barrier to research utilization in nursing (n = 39, 73.58%). This is followed by presentation-related factors (n = 16.98%) and nurse-related factors (n = 5, 9.43%), respectively. Findings revealed that insufficient time at work in implementing new ideas was perceived as the top barrier in research utilization in nursing. CONCLUSION: It is crucial to determine the hindrances to the utilization of research findings. The results of this study establish the connection between research and evidence-based practice which stimulates in meeting the gap in the current nursing practice. Future studies must include research utilization studies that apply tools other than the BARRIER scale.