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 […]

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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AJN in May: Night-Shift Naps, Intrathecal Cancer Pain Relief, Teaching Nurses to Write, More

On this month’s cover is A Maid Asleep (1656–57) by the Dutch master Johannes Vermeer. We chose this painting to call attention to the issue of sleepiness in nurses who work the night shift, which is explored in this month’s Original Research article.

On-the-job sleepiness among nurses can increase the risk of patient care errors, job-related injuries, and long-term health problems.

For night-shift nurses, one potential solution is being allowed to take brief naps during a shift, which the American Nurses Association recommends as an evidence-based countermeasure to fatigue. But nurses may face barriers to doing so, including a lack of formal breaks on the unit and concerns about impeding the quality of nursing care. To learn about a project that explored those barriers and attempted to implement night-shift naps, read “Napping on the Night Shift: A Two-Hospital Implementation Project.”

Some other articles of note in the May issue:

CE Feature: “Intrathecal Pumps for Managing Cancer Pain.” Among patients with cancer, moderate to severe pain is prevalent and can be refractory even with the use of systemic opioids, which may cause adverse effects that are difficult to manage at the doses required to control pain. When delivered intrathecally, however, opioids and adjuvant analgesics may provide greater pain relief at dramatically lower doses and with fewer adverse effects. This article provides an overview of intrathecal pump therapy, including its benefits and potential risks and complications; the medications that can be delivered intrathecally; and the nursing care […]

2016-11-21T13:01:16-05:00April 29th, 2016|Nursing, nursing perspective, nursing research|0 Comments
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Have You Fallen Prey to a Predatory Publisher?

Predatory publishers promise prompt, easy publication. The hidden charges come later, as well as the realization that the journal has no real standing or quality control. Not only is this bad for potential authors, it’s bad for knowledge, flooding the market with inferior information made to superficially resemble the information you need.

Imagine this scenario: You receive an email from a seemingly respectable journal inviting you to submit a paper for publication. You’ve wanted to publish on this topic for some time, and this journal promises you a quick review and publication within a few months. As a new author, you are thrilled . . . that is, until you get charged an outrageous processing fee upon turning the article in. You’ve just fallen victim to a predatory publisher.

Unfortunately, this scenario is becoming all too common. These journals are often difficult to spot, with their professional-looking Web sites and names that sound legitimate, if a little vague. In fact, just recently at AJN, we stumbled across a Web site featuring a journal that looked a lot like ours and had a very similar name. (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.)

shawnkennedyIn our April issue, editor-in-chief […]

2016-11-21T13:02:43-05:00April 6th, 2015|career, nursing perspective, nursing research|0 Comments
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Need Help Writing Systematic Reviews?

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

CaptureAs I explain in this month’s editorial, we’ve seen an increase in submissions, especially literature reviews, many from students in doctoral programs and from clinicians in organizations pursuing Magnet status. Many purport to be systematic reviews but lack many of the defining features, such as detail about search strategies or real synthesis of the results. This lack of knowledge around writing scholarly works reflects poorly on us as a profession.

We are very pleased to be collaborating with the Joanna Briggs Institute, the Australia-based group (they are at the University of Adelaide) with an expertise in appraising and synthesizing research and facilitating its dissemination and use. We launch a new series, Systematic Reviews, Step By Step, in the March issue. As our Evidence-Based Practice, Step-By-Step series does for applying evidence-based practice, this series presents a clear, progressive plan for writing a systematic review in several monthly installments. […]

2017-05-27T10:36:27-04:00March 10th, 2014|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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