That Capstone Time of Year
Is that paper ready for prime time?
It’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 […]