Redefining the meta-language of nursing science

Due to technical difficulties with my webinar last week I decided to make a recording of my presentation that is now available as a YouTube video. The length is just under 30 minutes. I hope you will join me for “lunch” or “tea” to experience the video, and share your thoughts and critique here or on the NurseManifest Project blog.

This presentation covers some of the ideas from my recent paper “The Integrality of Situated Caring in Nursing and the Environment” published in the current issue of Advances in Nursing Science. I sincerely look forward to the dialogue that I hope this presentation and paper will provoke. Don’t be shy, please share your thoughts.

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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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2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,200 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 37 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

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Finding a “home” for your manuscript

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 Finding a Home for your manuscriptone 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!

 

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Why ANS is a Topical Journal

One of the unique features of ANS is that it has maintained the “Issue Topic” focus for each issue.  When we began publication in 1978, the publisher at the time (Aspen Publishers) wanted all of their journals to conform to a topical format.  Since this was my first experience as a journal editor, and was primarily focused on getting the journal Health focusunderway, I happily agreed!  As an aside, the Aspen managing editor I worked with, Wally Hood, also designed the ANS cover, which has remained constant as well.

When Lippincott, Wolters & Kluwer assumed publication of the journal in 2002, they were open to making changes in the journal and we discussed several options.  Our Senior Publisher, Sandy Kasko, agreed that the cover design should remain the same because of the distinctive identification it brought to the journal.  We also agreed that the topical format should remain as a distinctive feature of the journal, and the Advisory Board members have remained committed to our topical format.

The primary reason remains this: our topics call forth scholarship that might otherwise be neglected in nursing’s literature.  It encourages prospective authors Continue reading

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Challenges and changes in scholarly publishing

Whatever your interest is in the realm of scholarly publishing, one thing is clear – the landscape is changing dramatically!  The most challenging aspect of what is happening is that nobody knows exactly how things are going to evolve and what direction will be thePublishing of the future? most viable in the future.  What we do know is that the internet is destined to play an increasingly important role, but we can only imagine exactly how the internet will eventually shape the future of scholarly publishing.  Here are two important changes that I am anticipating, and the scope of change that seems possible:

  • The roles and responsibilities of publishers. The internet is making it possible for almost anyone to become a publisher, and is changing the ways that traditional publishers do business.  Publishers play a significant role in assuring certain standards of quality in their publications.  They cover the cost of getting the publication from manuscript to print and they manage the task of distribution of the product.  The internet provides Continue reading
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Reflections on the current issue: Trauma & Stress

The current issue of ANS is now available on our ANS Web site, and it promises to another issue of lasting influence!  If you have not already done so, take a look at the Table of Contents and see for yourself what this issue contains.  We will be featuring each of these articles in the “Featured Articles” section of the web site, and while they are featured you will be able to download them at no cost.  If you are a journal subscriber, you have access to all of the articles in not only this issue, but all issues of ANS published since the beginning in 1978!

Given that ANS articles are unsolicited, we can never predict the content profile of any single issue.  We publish issue topics well in advance of the date by which manuscripts must be submitted to considered for each issue, but we leave the interpretation of issue topics open.  But for this issue of ANS, I anticipated that authors might address two substantive areas – trauma and stress brought about by war, and that brought about by violence in the home.  Indeed, both of these areas of concern appeared in the articles we considered for publication, as well as those that were accepted for publication.

Predominantly, nurse authors represented in this issue Continue reading

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