AJN’s 2025 Book of the Year Awards and Other Highlights of the January Issue

The January issue of AJN is now live.

AJN’s 2025 Book of the Year Awards can be found in the the current issue. Browse judges’ choices in a wide variety of categories.

On this month’s cover is Eyes of Gold 2 [Children of The Sun With Moon Crescent Blood], a work by artist Rizzy Akanji, creative director of Akanji Studio—a London-based art and storytelling house that “uses visual art, poetry, and creative education to raise awareness for sickle cell disorder and to transform lived experiences of pain into expressions of power and beauty.”

Below are articles from the January issue we’d like to draw your attention to:

A review article (CE credit available), “Sickle Cell Disease: Treatment Options of the Past, Present, and Future,” gives an up-to-date overview of what every nurse will want to know about this challenging and painful condition.

“Exploring Retention Among Army Nurses: A Qualitative Study” is an open access original research article based on the authors’ interviews with active-duty Army nurses. It identifies two key priorities that emerged from interviews and subsequent analysis as to why nurses choose to stay.

The second original research article in our January issue is […]

2025-12-30T10:00:09-05:00December 30th, 2025|Nursing|0 Comments
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The Ethical Use of our Therapeutic Connections with Patients’ Families

“What would you do, doctor?” The family had been explicit in wanting straightforward communication about their child, whose neurological disease had progressed to the point where she was continually seizing, despite every medication the physicians had tried. The seizures were in turn damaging her brain, such that she was minimally responsive to stimuli and was not expected to regain significant awareness of her surroundings.

I held my breath as I anticipated the doctor’s reply. She had spent many hours with this patient and family, and had built trust with the parents.

“As a physician . . . I would transition my child to comfort care and ultimately let her go. But as a mother . . . I would struggle to do this.”

The patient’s mom nodded tearfully. The doctor had given an honest reply, and had still ultimately left the choice to the parents.

I took care of this patient in her final few days of life. The parents were heartbroken but also clear in their decision. We walked them through each step, and made sure they felt supported to the best of our ability, down to their very last goodbye with their child.

******

There is power in the medication and therapies we apply. Fluid and […]

2025-12-18T10:39:59-05:00December 18th, 2025|Ethics, family, family experience, narratives, nursing roles, nursing stories|1 Comment
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Nursing Is Still a Profession — But a New Loan Law Treats It Differently

What new federal “professional degree” loan caps actually mean for graduate nursing students

Over the past few weeks, many nurses have watched headlines and social media posts claim that “Trump made nursing no longer a profession.”

That line is alarming—but it isn’t accurate.

Nursing is still a licensed profession defined by statute, governed by boards of nursing, and recognized by every hospital system in the country. Our scope of practice hasn’t changed. Our credentials haven’t changed. Our professional identity hasn’t changed.

What has changed is a technical federal loan category—one that now places graduate nursing programs in the same bucket as standard academic master’s programs rather than alongside medicine, dentistry, or law. For some future nurses, that shift could affect how they pay for school. For others, the change may barely be noticeable. The details matter, and the math matters even more.

What the Big Beautiful Bill actually changed

In July 2025, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (“OB3”), a sprawling package that, among many things, rewrites portions of the federal student loan system beginning July 1, 2026.

The most significant change for nurses is the elimination of Grad PLUS loans—the program that previously allowed graduate students to borrow up to their school’s full cost of attendance. […]

2025-12-16T10:14:23-05:00December 16th, 2025|Nursing|1 Comment
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The Rise of Anti-Intellectualism, Snapshot of Nursing in Gaza, Video Monitoring to Reduce Falls: December Issue Recommended Reading

The December issue of AJN is now live.

Some articles in this issue will be open access or free to access for a set period; others will require log-in or subscription. Below are some articles of note we’d like to draw your attention to.

This issue has two original research articles. The first is of these is an observational cohort study looking at implementation of a continuous video monitoring program to decrease falls in a long-term acute care hospital setting. This article is open access.

The second original research article in our December issue is “Investigating the Relationships Among Nurses’ Stress, Sleep Quality, and Mental Health, and the Mediating Role of Coping Strategies and Social Support: A Cross-Sectional Study.” According to the authors, “This study highlights strong associations between stress, sleep quality, anxiety, and depressive symptoms, with coping strategies and social support as potential mediators.”

An integrative review (currently free to read) looks at what we currently know (and don’t know but need to study) about best practices for implementing hospital-based virtual nursing.

Our editorial by editor-in-chief Carl Kirton indulges a little word play in its title, “The Rise of AI.” But the topic […]

2025-11-20T11:34:48-05:00November 20th, 2025|digital health, Nursing, nursing research, Public health, Technology|0 Comments
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Deep Research: Understanding the Limitations of the Latest Powerful AI Tool for Scholarly Authors

In February 2024, I wrote an AJN Off the Charts blog post titled “Leveraging AI and Technology for Comprehensive Research: Tips for Researchers and Students.” Since then, the field of AI has undergone rapid evolution. It is evident to all of us watching the field develop that companies hosting and developing large language models (LLMs) would eventually target scientific research. In my previous post, I explained that there is no single software solution for conducting research or literature reviews using AI. However, the deployment of new features in AI software platforms, such as deep research capabilities, may mislead us into thinking otherwise. The purpose of this blog post is to introduce the idea of deep research tools, while also providing tips for users who wish to explore these evolving tools.

What is deep research?

Image: Marcus Winkler/Unsplash

Deep research is a term used by LLM software platforms that allow users to enter a prompt to initiate an in-depth process that involves finding, analyzing, and synthesizing “hundreds of online sources to create a comprehensive report at the level of a research analysis” (OpenAI, 2025). There is also a consideration for time using this tool, as the responses are not instantaneous and result time can vary based on […]

2025-11-18T09:05:01-05:00November 18th, 2025|artificial intelligence (AI), Nursing, nursing research, Technology|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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