International Journal of Nursing Studies

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1 International Journal of Nursing Studies 52 (2015) Contents lists available at ScienceDirect International Journal of Nursing Studies journal homepage: Editorial Ten years into the job: A nursing journal for the future It has been a decade since I had the privilege to be appointed as the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Nursing Studies, so this seems an opportune moment to take stock, to reflect on the history and contribution of the journal to the development of professional nursing and midwifery and also to set out its direction for the future. For most practising nurses today the International Journal of Nursing Studies has always been there. It has been publishing original peer-reviewed articles since 1963, making it one of the most established research journals in the field and the longest-standing nursing research journal based in Europe. Originally published quarterly, its output has grown over the years and it became a monthly publication in The language of publication is English, but in its early years some abstracts were published in French and Russian. The International Journal of Nursing Studies was originally published by Pergamon Press and it is now published by Reed Elsevier. The founding editor of the International Journal of Nursing Studies was Elsie Stevenson of the Nursing Studies Research Unit at the University of Edinburgh. In 1968 Dr. K.J.W. Wilson, also based at the University of Edinburgh, took over as editor, and later the editorial office moved with Wilson to the Health Services Research Centre at the University of Birmingham. Wilson remained as editor for 14 years, until 1982, when she stepped down to be replaced by the directors of two national nursing research units in England Rosemary Crow, based at Northwick Park Hospital, and Caroline Cox (later Baroness Cox) of the Nursing Education Research Unit, Chelsea College, University of London. Cox stepped down in 1992 and Crow, who had by this time moved to the University of Surrey, remained as the editor-in-chief for a further eight years, her total of 18 years making her the longest-serving editor to date. Since 2000 the International Journal of Nursing Studies editorial office has been based at King s College London, initially under Dame Jenifer Wilson-Barnett, who was the editor-in-chief from 2000 to 2004, and since 2005 under me, Ian Norman. Later in 2005 I was joined by my colleague, Peter Griffiths, who was appointed as the International Journal of Nursing Studies Executive Editor. At that time Peter was Director of the National Nursing Research Unit at King s College London, which had its origins in the research unit led by a former editor, Caroline Cox, at Chelsea College. Peter is now based at the University of Southampton. My immediate predecessor likened the International Journal of Nursing Studies to journals such as the Lancet, the American Journal of Nutrition and the International Journal of Pharmacy Practice (Wilson-Barnett, 2000). Certainly, the International Journal of Nursing Studies is part of the landscape and history of professional nursing and midwifery, and over many years has made a major contribution to their development. However, by 2005 it seemed to Peter and me that in spite of its international reputation it was, to use a boxing analogy, punching below its weight. Evidence for this came from journal metrics, in particular the annual Thomson-Reuters Impact Factor (2015), which by 2005 had emerged as an important way by which authors and readers separated the more influential from the less influential journals in a subject field. The 2004 impact factor for the International Journal of Nursing Studies was 0.692, which ranked the journal in 17th place, behind other nursing journals, many of which were otherwise less well established. A major challenge in 2005, as now, is to increase collaboration between professionals from different disciplines and to provide opportunities for patients to be genuine partners in their own care. However, the reading habits of professionals can act as a barrier to this; too rarely do we cross multi-disciplinary boundaries we remain too committed to our own health tribes. In my first editorial (Norman, 2005) I set out a challenge for the International Journal of Nursing Studies: to widen its readership and increase its influence on the development of healthcare while retaining its traditional role as one of the driving forces behind the development of nursing and midwifery internationally. Since then we have been working towards /ß 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

2 1408 Editorial / International Journal of Nursing Studies 52 (2015) these goals with outstanding support from our editorial board members and the team of excellent associate editors who have joined us along the way. So what have we done to achieve our goals, how successful have we been and what is the direction for the International Journal of Nursing Studies over the next decade? Our aspirations were given concrete expression in the revised aims and scope of the International Journal of Nursing Studies ( which we launched in 2010 following considerable debate between editors and board members over several years. In an editorial published the following year (Griffiths and Norman, 2011) we argued that the proliferation of nursing research journals since the publication of the International Journal of Nursing Studies in 1963 required every nursing journal, not just new ones, to be clear about their purpose. Our revised aims and scope is our expression of the journal s purpose: to place high quality research and review papers before a wide audience of practitioners, scholars and policy makers; and to stimulate debate across nursing specialties and with other healthcare disciplines. We also want the International Journal of Nursing Studies to contribute in particular to our understanding of healthcare interventions which appear to us to be increasingly complex, in that they comprise interacting components, which present a number of special problems for evaluators. To this end we published the Richards and Borglin (2011) call for the UK Medical Research Council Framework for Developing and Evaluating Complex Interventions in Healthcare (Craig et al., 2013) to be adopted as a framework for the training and development of nursing researchers and we subsequently published papers in which the developers of the framework reflected on its development and impact (Craig and Petticrew, 2013). For us, the MRC Framework has great appeal as an organising framework for research training across the health professions and, particularly in nursing research, as a unifying mechanism for putting an end to long-running, sterile debates about the relative merits of quantitative and qualitative research (Griffiths and Norman, 2013). One of the privileges of editing the International Journal of Nursing Studies is the opportunity to reflect on trends in academic publication and to bring to the attention of the nursing research community papers that contribute to the development of research methods. We have drawn together papers on publishing nursing research, and on research methods, in two virtual issues which are available at: journalofnursingstudies.com/#. Recent additions to our virtual issue on publishing nursing research include reflections on the use and misuse of the term systematic in relation to reviews (Norman and Griffiths, 2014), a consideration of the contribution of the International Journal of Nursing Studies to healthcare on the occasion of its 50th anniversary (Norman and Griffiths, 2013a) and an evaluation of the publication efficiency of highimpact nursing journals (Palese et al., 2013). Our virtual issue on research methods provides advice on building research capacity in nursing (Thompson and Clark, 2013), advice on measurement decisions in nursing and midwifery, from our statistical editor Jason Beckstead (Beckstead, 2013a,b,c,d; Norman and Griffiths, 2013b) and consideration of the methodological challenges for designing trials for pressure ulcer risk assessment research (Balzer et al., 2013). In addition to these two virtual issues, we have published seven special issues of the International Journal of Nursing Studies over the past decade, and we have another one in the pipeline, on language and communication issues in healthcare practice and research (Squires and Jacobs, 2014). Special issues have covered a variety of topics including clinical research (Hallberg, 2009), implementation science (Sales, 2013; Van Achterberg, 2013), improving the care of older people (Capezuti and Hamers, 2013), child health care (Franck and Salantera, 2013), mental health (Brooker, 2007) and the nursing workforce (Rafferty and Clarke, 2009; Van den Heede and Aiken, 2013). At one time, publication was widely seen as the final stage of the research process. But over the past decade there has been a growing awareness that it is the impact of research which is most important. As defined by the recent UK Research Excellence Framework (Atkins, 2014) research impact must have occurred outside academia, and must influence areas such as healthcare or the economy, society, culture or quality of life (McKenna, 2015). It would be interesting to identify those papers published in the International Journal of Nursing Studies over the past decade which have a good evidence trail, independently verified, to strongly link the underpinning research to its impact on the world. Certainly, a number of papers have created quite a stir and do appear to have influenced change in healthcare practice. One recent example was a guest editorial from Macintyre and colleagues (MacIntyre et al., 2014a), which was the first published paper to question the adequacy of recommended respiratory protection for healthcare workers treating the Ebola virus, and was the most downloaded-paper from the International Journal of Nursing Studies for three months following publication. This influential editorial led to a debate with the authors of a paper published in the Lancet (MacIntyre et al., 2014b; Martin-Moreno et al., 2014a,b). There is clear evidence that the article was rapidly noticed, and it still ranks among the top 1% of scientific articles tracked by Altmetrics, a measure of wider impact, including mentions in print and social media. Following publication of MacIntyre s editorial, guidance on respiratory protection for Ebola healthcare workers was strengthened. In many cases impact takes a long time to become apparent, but I would invite readers to begin to set out evidence for the impact of previously published papers in the International Journal of Nursing Studies letters column. It is not easy to single out particular areas of healthcare in which papers published in the International Journal of Nursing Studies have made a substantial contribution, because a number come to mind. However, the contribution of the International Journal of Nursing Studies to our understanding of the nursing workforce is one area that

3 Editorial / International Journal of Nursing Studies 52 (2015) stands out. In addition to the nursing workforce special issue, mentioned above, we published an issue devoted largely to the RN4Cast study, which reported findings from the then largest nursing workforce study conducted in the EU (Van den Heede and Aiken, 2013). Notable papers in this special issue of the International Journal of Nursing Studies included a report of nurses working conditions and hospital quality of care in 12 European countries (Aiken et al., 2013), effective strategies for nurse retention in acute hospitals (Van den Heede et al., 2013) and an analysis of English administrative data which identified the importance of staffing by doctors in rates of failure to rescue, previously identified as a particularly nurse-sensitive patient safety indicator for surgical care (Griffiths et al., 2013). Research impact is not the same as the dissemination of research results, but impact is unlikely to occur unless research gets noticed reasonably quickly by those who might use it to change the world. Long delays in getting published can mean that timely adoption of research findings is not possible. At the International Journal of Nursing Studies we have made it easier for authors to submit their papers, through the simpler submission service enabling authors to submit their manuscript in any format or layout that can be used by the referees, so avoiding the need to spend time formatting the paper into the International Journal of Nursing Studies house style. Rapid review and on-line publication is also important here, and we have sought to drive down processing times without compromising the scientific quality of the review. In 2014 the average time from submission to first decision was 3.1 weeks, from submission to final decision 5.5 weeks and from manuscript acceptance to the first appearance of the article online 1.9 weeks ( /review_speed). We also now offer a 4* fasttrack publication service to ensure rapid publication of research papers that are potentially newsworthy, and the option for authors to increase the accessibility of their research by presenting their findings in a 5-minute webcast-style format using audio slides; the uptake of this option by authors is limited at the moment but we expect it to increase. Today, social media play a key role in disseminating research findings. The International Journal of Nursing Studies has promoted this through its Twitter which has a rapidly expanding number of followers and ensures that new papers are rapidly brought to the attention of tens of thousands of interested parties through tweets and retweets. One of the biggest changes in healthcare publishing over the past decade has been the trend towards open access publication; that is, publications which are accessible online free of charge. Funding bodies, notably the National Institute for Health in the US, and more recently, the UK research councils and the National Institute for Health Research, have clear policies that publicly-funded research should be open access. This has been confirmed by the UK Higher Education Funding Council which stipulates that, in future, all submissions for the periodic assessment of research quality in the UK, the Research Excellence Framework (REF) will be based on open access papers. It is clear that there will be much more open access publication over the next decade than in the last. But there appears to be a misconception amongst some authors that open access publishing is the exclusive domain of open access journals (such as the BMC series or PLOS) where the author pays the cost of publication. This is not true. The International Journal of Nursing Studies offers open access publication, but without removing the option for authors to submit their paper instead through the traditional reader-pays route. Our hybrid publication model provides authors with a choice, whilst ensuring that, whichever route they choose their paper receives the high level of scientific scrutiny and publication services they expect. In a recent editorial Peter (Griffiths, 2014) set out the choices available at the International Journal of Nursing Studies and alerted authors to the increasingly long list of predatory open access journals ( com/publishers/) in which scientific peer-review is little more than a sham. Another change that I have noticed over the past decade is an increase in the number of requests which we all receive to peer review papers submitted to journals for publication. More papers means more journals means more demands on reviewers. In spite of these increasing pressures on reviewers, I continue to be hugely impressed by the high standards of the reviews we receive. Our aim at the International Journal of Nursing Studies is to provide authors with constructive feedback to help them improve their paper, and this is as true for papers that we decide not to accept for publication as those which we do. Reviewers are a precious resource; without them the process of scientific scrutiny would grind to a halt. For this reason I was pleased that the International Journal of Nursing Studies was the first academic nursing journal to launch an annual Reviewers Excellence Award, in 2012, a distinctive feature of which is that the reviewer is nominated by the author of the reviewed paper. Jan Kottner, a skin and ulcer research specialist based in Germany, was the recipient of the 2012 award for his review of a systematic review of patient risk factors for pressure ulcer development (Coleman et al., 2013); and Yves Chaput, a psychiatrist based in Canada, the recipient of the 2013 award for his review of a study of predictors of frequent visits to a psychiatric emergency room (Aagaard et al., 2014). The 2014 International Journal of Nursing Studies Reviewers Excellence Award was a close-run affair, and so this year I m pleased to announce that we have a winner and also a runner-up. The winner is Heather Laschinger, who holds the Arthur Labatt Family Nursing Research Chair in Human Resource Optimization at the University of Western Ontario, for her review of a paper reporting risk factors and the prevalence of burnout in a sample of Spanish nurses (De La Fuente et al., 2015). The runner-up is Paul Maurice Conway an Associate Professor based in the Department of Psychology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, for his review of a paper reporting processes involved in the relationship between leadership and employee distress (Lornudd et al., 2015). Reviews from the winners of the International Journal of Nursing

4 1410 Editorial / International Journal of Nursing Studies 52 (2015) Studies Reviewers Excellence Awards are available on So what does the International Journal of Nursing Studies look like today compared to a decade ago? Certainly it is a much bigger enterprise. All staff are still part-time and almost all fit work on the journal around full-time academic jobs. But from a low baseline of one editor and one editorial assistant ten years ago, we now have two editorial assistants, two senior editors, two statistical editors and 16 associate editors, located around the world supported by members of our editorial board. And since 2008 we have published 12 issues a year instead of eight. Aside from becoming bigger, the International Journal of Nursing Studies is, I believe, publishing higher-quality papers, as a result of which the journal has emerged as almost certainly the most influential generic academic nursing journal in the world, having been ranked within the top three journals in the Thompson Reuters impact factor list of nursing journals (106 journals currently) for six of the past seven years. The progress of the International Journal of Nursing Studies over the past decade, is very much the result of a team effort between editors, board members, our publisher and reviewers and it has been a privilege to be part of a brilliant team. But no journal can afford to rest on its laurels. Over the next decade, as in the previous one, we will continue to steer a steady course to publish research reports of the highest quality which are likely to have a positive impact on the care of patients. We will also seek to broaden the journal s readership beyond nursing and midwifery, so that the International Journal of Nursing Studies will emerge as a healthcare research journal with a particular focus on the contribution of nursing and midwifery to the healthcare endeavour. The International Journal of Nursing Studies is, and will remain, a nursing journal for the future. References Aagaard, J., Aagaard, A., Buus, N., Predictors of frequent visits to a psychiatric emergency room: a large-scale register study combined with a small scale interview study. Int. J. Nurs. Stud. 51 (7), Aiken, L.H., Sloane, D.M., Bruyneel, L., Van den Heede, K., Sermus, W., Nurses reports of working conditions and hospital quality of care in 12 countries in Europe. Int. J. Nurs. Stud. 50 (2), Atkins, M., Open access in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework. Circular letter 07/2014, 31 March 2014 March UK Higher Education Funding Council. Retrieved from pubs/year/2014/cl,072014/ Balzer, K., Köpke, S., Lühmann, D., Haastert, B., Kottner, J., Meyer, G., Designing trials for pressure ulcer risk assessment research: methodological challenges. Int. J. Nurs. Stud. 50 (8), Beckstead, J., 2013a. On measurements and their quality: Paper 1: Reliability history, issues and procedures. Int. J. Nurs. Stud. 50 (7), Beckstead, J., 2013b. On measurements and their quality: Paper 2: Random measurement error and the power of statistical tests. Int. J. Nurs. Stud. 50 (10), Beckstead, J., 2013c. On measurements and their quality: Paper 3: Post hoc pooling and errors of discreteness. Int. J. Nurs. Stud. 51 (3), Beckstead, J., 2013d. On measurements and their quality: Paper 4: Verbal anchors and the number of response options in rating scales. Int. J. Nurs. Stud. 51 (5), Brooker, C., The Chief Nursing Officer s review of mental health nursing in England: an ode to motherhood and apple pie? Int. J. Nurs. 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Stud. 52 (2), MacIntyre, C.R., Chughtai, A.A., Seale, H., Richards, G.A., Davidson, P.M., 2014a. Respiratory protection for healthcare workers treating Ebola virus disease (EVD): are facemasks sufficient to meet occupational health and safety obligations? Int. J. Nurs. Stud. 51, MacIntyre, C.R., Chughtai, A.A., Seale, H., Richards, G.A., Davidson, P.M., 2014b. Response to Martin-Moreno et al. (2014): Surgical mask or no mask for health workers not a defensible position for Ebola. Int. J. Nurs. Stud. 51, McKenna, H., Research assessment: the impact of impact. Int. J. Nurs. Stud. 52 (1), 1 3. Martin-Moreno, J.M., Llinas, G., Martinez-Hernandez, J., 2014a. Is respiratory protection appropriate in the Ebola response? Lancet 384 (9946), 856. Martin-Moreno, J.M., Llinas, G., Martinez-Hernandez, J., 2014b. Response to MacIntyre et al. 2014: Respiratory protection for healthcare workers treating Ebola virus disease (EVD): are facemasks sufficient to meet occupational health and safety obligations? Int. J. Nurs. Stud. 51 (12), Norman, I.J., Editorial. Int. J. Nurs. Stud. 42, 1 2. Norman, I.J., Griffiths, P., 2013a. 50th Anniversary Editorial: building on firm foundations. Int. J. Nurs. Stud. 50 (1), 1 4. Norman, I.J., Griffiths, P., 2013b. Measurement decisions in nursing and midwifery research. Int. J. Nurs. Stud. 50 (7), Norman, I.J., Griffiths, P., The rise and rise of the systematic review. Int. J. Nurs. Stud. 51 (1), 1 3. Palese, A., Coletti, S., Dante, A., Publication efficiency among the higher impact factor nursing journals in 2009: a retrospective analysis. Int. J. Nurs. Stud. 50 (4), Rafferty, A.M., Clarke, S.P., Nursing workforce: a special issue. Int. J. Nurs. 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5 Editorial / International Journal of Nursing Studies 52 (2015) Thompson, D.R., Clark, A.M., Built to last : insights for successful research programs from three continents. Int. J. Nurs. Stud. 50 (8), Van Achterberg, T., Nursing implementation science: 10 ways forward. Int. J. Nurs. Stud. 50 (4), Van den Heede, K., Aiken, L.H., Nursing workforce a global priority area for health policy and health services research: a special issue. Int. J. Nurs. Stud. 50 (2), Van den Heede, K., Florquin, M., Bruyneel, L., Aiken, L., Diya, L., Lesaffre, E., Sermus, W., Effective strategies for nurse retention in acute hospitals: a mixed method study. Int. J. Nurs. Stud. 50 (2), Wilson-Barnett, J. (Ed.), Editorial. Int. J. Nurs. Stud. 37 (2), Editor-in-Chief Ian Norman* King s College London, Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery, UK *Tel.: address: Ian.j.norman@kcl.ac.uk Received 20 April 2015 Accepted 22 April 2015