One of the most important tasks for any author, new or seasoned, is finding a place to have your scholarly work published. These days one “criteria” that many authors use is to find out which journals have high impact factor scores, and then pursue publication in 
one of those journals. While there are many reasons that authors start here, it is not always the best place to begin!
The Impact Factor scoring system is managed and reported by Thomson-Reuters through their Web of Knowledge service. While this is a valuable resource, the fact is that some very high quality and important journals will never be represented in this system. Any journal that publishes work that has a very narrow audience – scientists and scholars working in a very focused field of study – will never attract others to their publication, and therefore their publications will not be widely cited. This is actually a dynamic that effects scores for nursing journals, since our journals have not yet attracted widespread use by scholars outside of the field of nursing and some related health professions. A journal such as the New England Journal of Medicine, for example, that many people both in and outside of the health professions use and cite, will carry a much higher impact factor score than any of our nursing journals (yet!).
However, back to the focus of this blog — what is the best way to find a “home” for your manuscript? The first and most important task is to consider which journals reach the audience that you want your article to reach. You can browse a comprehensive list of nursing journals, with links to their “Information for Authors,” on the Nurse Author-Editor web site. Once you find journals that might reach your intended audience, the next challenge is to study the journal’s statement of purpose, recently published issues, and requirements for manuscript preparation and submission.
Like most other journals, ANS has everything you need right at your fingertips on line!
- To determine if your manuscript is appropriate for the journal, check out the list of future issue topics in the right column of the home page. Since we are a topical journal you need to first determine if your manuscript has a good fit with our future topics. You can find a description of each of the topics when you click on any of the listed topics.
- For detailed information about the purpose of ANS, go to the “For Authors” tab of the home page. Here is the direct link to the “ANS Information for Authors.”
- On our home page, you can also browse the Table of Contents for each issue ever published in ANS, as well as abstracts of the articles. All articles are available for online purchase if you do not have access through a library.
Questions? Post them here in the comments for this post, and we will post the answers!
peggychinn
Thomas Cox PhD RN
Olga Jarrín
Nursing and the Environment
Valentine’s Day edit: Here is a link to narrated slides from the presentation I gave last week. Redefining the Metalanguage of Nursing Presentation
“Lost Souls” by Richard Cowling ~ 2002 NurseManifest Research Study
I just watched the film “The Politics of Caring” featured on the nursemanifest.com website and oh, does it make some powerful statements about politics in nursing that are still relevant today! A core messages in the film is the importance of improving hospital working conditions, both for the nurses, and for the safety and health of patients. Growing out of my involvement in the NurseManifest Project, much of my current work directly focuses on research about the nursing work environment, including nurse staffing and management practices.
One of the defining moments of my nursing education was learning about the concept of “Upstream Thinking” in my senior year Community & Public Health Nursing course. We learned about John Snow’s classic work on the London Cholera epidemic of 1854 and read Patricia Butterfield’s seminal “Thinking Upstream” article (Adv Nurs Sci 1990;12(2):1-8) that challenged nurses to think beyond one-to-one caring relationships and embrace the social, environmental and political determinants of health. This was reinforced the following year in my graduate nursing theory course, with the addition of Butterfield’s then new paper, “Upstream Reflections on Environmental Health” (Adv Nurs Sci 2002;25(1):32-49). While nursing education programs are working to integrate new content in (epi)genetics, (epi)genomics and environmental health it is more important than ever to emphasize the interconnectedness (or integrality) of human beings (including nurses!) and the environment.
The macro-level and micro-level ways that human beings, including nurses, are interconnected with their environment and each other will be the main focus of a free webinar/seminar that I’m giving next week and hope you will be able to attend. The presentation is titled Redefining the Metalanguage of Nursing Science: Contemporary Underpinnings for Innovation in Research, Education and Practice and will be on Wednesday, Feb 8, 2012 (12-1:30 EST) at the University of Pennsylvania, Barbara Bates Center for the Study of Nursing History. This presentation will utilize images and narrative to explore the ideas presented in my new paper, The Integrality of Situated Caring in Nursing and the Environment, currently featured on the Advances in Nursing Science website.
To register for the webinar: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/210662026
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