Thinking About Writing? Here Are the Next Steps

Been procrastinating?

We’re entering August, when many people take at least a few days for vacation before the busy school year begins. For those of you who’ve been procrastinating on writing that article you swore you would write over the summer, and for those who will face writing a capstone paper in your next semester, now’s the time. Here are some suggestions and resources that may help.

At www.ajnonline.com, under the Collections tab at the top, you can access our “Writing Resources” collection, where you’ll find our award-winning step-by-step series, Writing for Publication. It’s a free four-part series that guides you through the writing process. Also listed under the Collections tab is another step-by-step series, Writing Systematic Reviews.

The process of writing: set aside small regular time increments.

Forget trying to churn out a paper in one weekend—it’s a stressful and unfulfilling way to write, and the end product will fall short. If you want to really become a good writer, you need to write. It takes practice, like any other skill.

Commit to set aside a bit of time for writing. It doesn’t have to be a lot; start with 30 minutes, maybe three times a week, and get started writing. Commit to that time faithfully—make an appointment […]

2019-07-31T09:34:10-04:00July 31st, 2019|Nursing, nursing career, writing|0 Comments
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AJN Wants You! A Call for Peer Reviewers and Authors

nurse typing on keyboardTake your career to the next step—become a peer reviewer or author.

For over 118 years, AJN has presented its readers with timely and informative content to support best nursing practice and to examine issues of the day that are relevant to nurses and the profession. While that’s still our aim today, content development is more complex—it now includes peer review; fact-checking to ensure accuracy; citing evidence from the literature; ethical guidelines that govern editor, reviewer, and author behavior; careful editing to meet standards for quality writing; transparency to avoid bias and conflicts of interest. We’re proud of our commitment to high standards, and our success is borne out by the many awards we’ve received—more than any other nursing journal.

All of this wouldn’t be possible without the help of peer reviewers and authors, who commit to making the content we publish the best that it can be: timely, accurate, readable, and useful.

Peer reviewers are essential to any scholarly journal.

Peer-reviewing is also an excellent way for fledgling writers to better understand what editors look for in manuscripts. We welcome new reviewers who have expertise in nursing, are current with the literature and practice in their area of expertise, have a master’s degree or higher (or a BSN and certification in a specialty area), and are willing to review three to six manuscripts […]

2018-07-12T11:15:23-04:00July 12th, 2018|Nursing, nursing career, writing|0 Comments
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That Capstone Time of Year

Is that paper ready for prime time?

nurse typing on keyboardIt’s almost that time of year when graduate students (and some baccalaureate students, too) are preparing final papers. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears are involved, and understandably so—after all, these capstone projects and the resulting reports often determine whether one graduates. If done correctly, some papers might be worth submitting for publication. Faculty might even be encouraging you to do so—kudos.

I wrote a blog post a couple of years ago, suggesting some things that perhaps faculty neglect to mention along with their encouragement. As I noted in the post, we want you to be successful:

“…we need nurses at all levels to write about their work, and not enough of them do so. And the responsibility for nursing’s scholarly work cannot rest solely with academics and researchers; clinicians have the firsthand knowledge about care processes and outcomes, and they need to document their work. They need to communicate to the public about what it is that they do so that nurses’ work becomes more visible; they need to communicate to colleagues about what works and what doesn’t so that we can replicate successful quality improvement initiatives.”

Some Things You’ll Probably Need to Know to Get Published

So, before you get too far along in developing the paper, here’s that blog post, along with some […]

2018-03-28T09:25:47-04:00March 28th, 2018|Nursing, students, writing|0 Comments
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How to Identify and Avoid Predatory Journals

Photo by Alice Rosen, via Flickr.

I remember receiving my first “accept” letter for a novel I was working on many years ago. In my excitement, I didn’t stop to think that it was strange that, before the editor began working with me, I would have to pay a large sum of money to get the manuscript into shape. When my euphoria died down and my skepticism shot up, I decided to submit a fake query to the same publisher, highlighting a novel that could never possibly get published. Imagine my dismay when I received the exact same acceptance letter.

So in a way, predatory publishing is not an entirely new concept. And in fact, many more or less legitimate self-publishing options for books, fiction or otherwise, still exist. But with the increasing dominance of the Web and the rise of the open access movement—established to help spread publicly funded research—a more invidious and widely pervasive form of predatory publishing has taken hold in scholarly publishing. And the stakes are far higher. While my novel probably wasn’t going to affect anyone’s life, articles published by unscrupulous publishers—especially medical and nursing literature—have a lot more power to cause damage.

Flawed, unreliable content.

Since predatory journals often forego rigorous […]

2018-01-19T10:56:23-05:00January 19th, 2018|digital health, nursing research, writing|0 Comments
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AJN: Holding the Line on Quality in 2016

In the midst of the day-to-day demands of our lives and the constant multitasking, it’s often hard to step back and think about where the time went. Days and events seem to blur together. During the last week of the year, I like to review my calendar. I find that this exercise helps me put the year in perspective and revisit what I’ve done and who I’ve done it with.

My December editorial, “Taking Care of Business,” addresses how we can sometimes overlook colleagues who go about doing their jobs with little drama or complaint: the volunteers who give their time to free clinics, those who serve in the military or public service, the quietly competent colleagues we work with every day. They can easily become part of the blur of passing days because they show up, do their work, and move on to the next thing that needs to be done.

In the editorial, I briefly mentioned my colleagues here at AJN in that category. The staff works diligently to ensure that all manuscripts are fact-checked for accuracy and are edited to present the content in the best light and form. After a first round of editing, the articles are then copyedited. They’re laid out in page proofs and go through additional proofreading by a copy editor, nurse editors, and the article’s author(s). The process can be painstaking and repetitive, but accuracy and quality don’t happen without careful attention.

While AJN has […]

2017-01-03T10:04:03-05:00December 27th, 2016|Nursing|0 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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