Title: Encouraging Nursing Publishing to Rise to Its Potential
Abstract: Much has been made of the Institute of Medicine's “Future of Nursing” report calling for an increased leadership and professional role for nurses. State professional nursing associations, universities, and national nursing groups have acted to more clearly define what should be done and what can be done to help establish a broader leadership role for nurses with professional knowledge and talent in a future with fewer nurses, changing resources, and many more patients. Practicing to the full potential of their education is a given. This is a time when nursing journal editors and publishers must also look to the future and try to craft a vision for supporting a more sophisticated and knowledgeable NP readership. While many nurses may read only 2 or 3 nursing journals regularly, many publishers may support as many as 30 nursing journals. A few of these are aimed at general nursing, but many support nursing specialties or organizations. The inclusion of nursing articles in huge databases (eg, Medline, Nursing Consult, and Science Direct) or Web-based publications (eg, Medscape) allows nurses to have almost unfettered access to the scholarly work of other nurses. There are some powerful strategies to pursue to help nurse leaders. For many years, I worked with a colleague to survey the professional medical and nursing literature on a monthly basis, looking for health care trends in updates to diagnosis, treatment, or management; new drugs or products entering the market; and new research findings. The experience of carefully considering what was being published in medical and nursing journals every month left us with some unmistakable conclusions: 1.A lot of clinical information published today is not very scholarly and does not make a valid contribution to the health care literature.2.Not a lot of high quality nursing research is being published.3.The best nursing research is often not being published in nursing journals.4.Nurse authors themselves often fail to seek out and cite good quality nursing research in their own articles. These 4 areas represent behaviors that might be spotlighted for change. At JNP, we call upon the faculty who are doing research themselves and guiding student research about and for nurse practitioners (NPs) to strengthen their methodologies, expand their samples, validate their statistics, and write directly to our NP audience about how their practices might be improved and strengthened based on those findings. We call on NP clinicians who are evaluating the programs they implement, making cogent observations and assessments about strengths or weaknesses in care and barriers to practice, to contribute these experiences in a way that benefits others facing the same issues. We pledge to give priority in publishing to those researchers and clinicians who do submit their high quality work to us and particularly those who review, document, and build on the high quality work of other nurses. The call to change includes all of us. Letter to the EditorThe Journal for Nurse PractitionersVol. 9Issue 3PreviewI read your January 2013 editorial with interest, and while I disagree that the nurse practitioner (NP) role needs to be reinvented, I couldn’t agree more that competence is the “coin of the realm,” as you put it. Full-Text PDF Letter to the EditorThe Journal for Nurse PractitionersVol. 9Issue 3PreviewThank you for your comments in your January 2013 editorial, where you mention “a lot of clinical information published today is not very scholarly and does not make a valid contribution to the health care literature.”1 I agree with this observation. Full-Text PDF