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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‘My Professor Said to Submit My Paper’ (We Hope They Also Told You This)

By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, AJN editor-in-chief

Niklas Bildhauer/ Wikimedia Commons Niklas Bildhauer/ Wikimedia Commons

When we get a manuscript submission, I always read the cover letter first to learn about the author and why the article was written. Often, the first sentence goes something like this: “I am a student and I’m submitting my capstone paper as required by my professor.” Or the letter may say, “My professor encouraged me to submit this paper, my capstone work.”

The paper is usually the very paper the student wrote and submitted to the professor. And that almost always means it’s not suitable for a professional journal.

The problem is not that we won’t consider manuscripts written by students—we sometimes welcome them, especially papers written by nurses who are experienced clinicians and working toward a graduate degree. The problem with the submissions I’m talking about here is inherent in the purpose of the papers themselves. Student papers are written primarily to demonstrate what the student knows about a subject; these papers tend to be expansive, cover the topic in a superficial way, and include a long list of references of books, articles, and Web sites (or, conversely, they may only have a few references, mostly Web sites, plus perhaps one much-cited textbook—thankfully, few are citing Wikipedia).

Student papers that describe themselves as “literature reviews” often have no information about the search strategy—and little synthesis. Instead, they contain a long list of various studies related to the […]

2018-03-27T15:43:18-04:00February 22nd, 2013|nursing perspective, nursing research|1 Comment
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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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