Need Motivation to Write? Submit to the AJN/Nurse Faculty Scholars Mentored Writing Award

You know you should write, and you have several topics running through your mind, but you just can’t quite get it together—how to start, how to choose the topic, where to start . . . .

Well, you don’t have to go it alone.

Mentored writing.

The 2020 AJN/Nurse Faculty Scholars Mentored Writing Awards program is open for submissions. This is an annual program to promote mentorship and develop scholarly writing skills among nurses. It was conceived by the 2012–2015 cohort of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Nurse Faculty Scholars Program, in honor of the mentorship they received.

This award was created to continue the legacy of mentorship and to support scholarship development for all nurses, and AJN is continuing this program as part of our mission to support excellence in nursing publishing.

The 2019 winner.

The winner of the 2019 award is Sara Wohlford, MPH, RN, from Roanoke, Virginia. She worked with her mentor, Kimberly Ferren Carter, PhD, RN, NEA-BC, to coauthor their winning article, “Nursing Engagement Improves Sustainability Outcomes for Healthcare,” which will be published later this year. […]

2020-01-07T11:52:02-05:00January 7th, 2020|Nursing|0 Comments
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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 with […]

2019-07-31T09:34:10-04:00July 31st, 2019|Nursing, nursing career, writing|0 Comments
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‘We Request Your Quiescent Contribution’: Predatory Publishers Are Absurd, But Not Funny

Multiple daily solicitations.

The screenshot below shows an excerpt from an email our editor-in-chief recently received. Editors at AJN receive multiple emails daily from mysterious publishers soliciting them for article submissions, important roles on editorial boards, or as conference speakers. If it weren’t alarming, it would be flattering. We’re not scholars and experts in sub-specialties of botany or engineering, in fossil fuel geology, neurosurgery, or, for that matter, microbiology. Our advice on such topics might well be dangerous, or at least irrelevant and wrong.

Some open access journals are highly respected in their fields; the journal that sent this letter also bills itself as open access, but if it contains legitimate articles on microbiology, and I’m not saying it doesn’t, they may find themselves with strange bedfellows.

Despite obvious warning signs, some authors are not deterred.

It’s impossible to keep ahead of the flood of such emails, most of which are characterized by typographical oddities and peculiar juxtapositions of tone. There are many other tell-tale signs of predatory publishers, most of which have little or no oversight from real content experts and no editing or filtering of content (one must simply pay a fee to be published or attend a conference).

But what’s most worrisome about this trend is that their strategy of casting […]

2019-02-28T11:46:34-05:00February 28th, 2019|Nursing, nursing research, writing|0 Comments
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Ongoing Article Series Helps Nurses Write for Publication

Do you have an idea, experience, or knowledge that you feel other nurses can benefit from? Most nurses outside of academia or the policy arena don’t think about writing for publication as something that they should or must do.

But in AJN’s ongoing four-part series, “Writing for Publication: Step By Step,” author Karen Roush, PhD, RN, FNP, highlights the need to make nurses’ voices heard:

Think about all you know and all you do as a nurse. Think about the clinical expertise you bring to your practice, the insights you’ve gained through experience. Think about the problems you solve, improving patient care or creating systems that run more effectively and efficiently. And think about the times you’ve been present at life-defining moments, at moments of suffering and renewal, at beginnings and endings. You carry all of this with you—knowledge and skills, wisdom and insight. It’s time to share it.

In the series, Roush, former clinical managing editor of AJN and an assistant professor at both Lehman College, Bronx, New York, and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, shares her experience and inside knowledge in writing and publishing in practical, easy-to-digest articles that take nurses through the […]

2017-04-24T09:53:25-04:00April 24th, 2017|Nursing|0 Comments
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Message to Authors: Think. Check. Submit.

By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Think. Check. Submit.

The above three words sum up the message of a new campaign to increase awareness among researchers and authors about predatory publishers—entities that take advantage of authors by unscrupulous practices that often leave the authors tied up in a contract and owing a large fee to publish in a journal that has little or no standing. (See my related editorial on predatory publishing in the April issue of AJN.)

Promising rapid publication, predatory journals lack peer review and fact-checking, often tout fake metrics, and may adopt names that are deceptively similar to those of established journals. Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado, has been tracking predatory publishers since 2009 and maintains a list of them on his Web site, Scholarly Open Access.

The Think. Check. Submit. campaign describes itself as an “industry-wide initiative that provides a checklist of quality indicators that can help researchers identify if a journal is a trustworthy.” It’s a new campaign “produced with the support of a coalition from across scholarly communications in response to discussions about deceptive publishing.” In brief, it asks authors to:

THINK about where they should publish their work. Are the journals they are considering reputable?

CHECK the list of questions designed to help determine if a journal is respectable […]

2016-11-21T13:01:57-05:00October 5th, 2015|Nursing, nursing perspective, nursing research|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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