Introduction: Access to trustworthy health information is one of the most important factors in nursing care. It is important that the nurses be assured of both importance and quality of information resources to access reliable health information. This study was conducted to assess different methods nurses and nursing students apply to access information resources and to assess the inhibiting factors in this respect.

  Methods: This descriptive and analytical study was conducted among 412 nurses and nursing students in hospitals affiliated to Semnan University of Medical Sciences and Social Security Organization of Semnan in 2011. A valid and reliable questionnaire was used for collecting data which were then analyzed by frequency distribution, mean, standard deviation, Mann-Whitney and Kruskal – Wallis tests and Chi-Square.

  Results: The nurses appeared to have greater tendency than nursing students to use their colleagues’ and patients’ information. They showed less tendency to use information of printed textbooks in clinical decision making. There was a significant difference between demographic profile of the participants and the use of different information resources (p <0.01). Moreover, there was a significant difference between nurses and nursing students in using different information resources and the inhibiting factors reported (P <0.01).

  Discussion: The results indicate that nurses and nursing students are more inclined to use traditional information resources such as the information given by patients, relatives or personnel. This might be due to different reasons one of which might be lack of skills to use hospital libraries. The findings suggest that h ealth information l iteracy is a major challenge in the nursing community, and information system professionals can undoubtedly facilitate the use of quality information in this regard.