Bibliometric awareness in nursing scholarship: Can we afford to ignore it any longer?

Abstract

In contemporary nursing academia, it is unthinkable that topics such as research methods, evidence-based practice, and the translation of research into practice would be omitted from nursing curricula at any level. What is surprising, however, is that despite a broad educational emphasis on "teaching research", the rising importance of bibliometrics appears to have been largely neglected. If nursing scholarship and nursing scholars are to prosper in the highly competitive field of modern health research, a sophisticated understanding of citation-based methods is clearly required. Armed with this knowledge, one can more successfully argue why scarce research funding, that might otherwise be channeled elsewhere, ought to be assigned to nursing researchers. We hereby urge readers to reflect on the extent to which bibliometrics is covered within formal nursing curricula at their college or university. It is no longer a case of if a graduate nurse will need this skill set for their future professional development, but when.

Peer-Review Publication Patterns: A Comparison of International Radiography Journals

“…The bibliometric review of publications in this manner is relatively novel in radiography, but can provide a useful benchmark on which to evaluate trends and explore opportunities within a profession or subject [11]. The scope of this study only included those journals that included both diagnostic and therapeutic articles, and it is recognized that there are a number of other journals within the radiography field that are focussed toward a single discipline or modality, which will also influence the overall picture.…”

“…A requirement of a minimum of five research papers per issue has been suggested to achieve an impact factor, the ultimate aim of a peer-review journal [1], but the lack of an impact factor is not unique to radiography, and many nursing [11] and most physiotherapy [12] journals are similarly positioned.…”

“…The scope of this study only included those journals that included both diagnostic and therapeutic articles, and it is recognized that there are a number of other journals within the radiography field that are focussed toward a single discipline or modality, which will also influence the overall picture. Further, the sharing of knowledge, whether research or opinion based, is also facilitated through books and conference presentations, although analysis of the latter is often limited because of the inconsistency of indexing or recording of information [11,12].…”

Evolution of physiotherapy scholarship: A comparative bibliometric analysis of two decades of English published work

“…This trend is not dissimilar to the findings identified by Benton, Cusack, Jabbour, and Penney () in the nursing literature, although in that case, the first paper was published more than a decade earlier in 1984. Nevertheless, both disciplines have seen a rapid increase in the use of the method, which has been attributed by Smith and Hazelton () to the increasing number of clinicians pursuing programmes with research components as well as the simultaneous growth in the number of journals published and indexed in databases.…”

The five top bad reasons nurses don’t publish in impactful journals

“…Researchers can change the world in many ways. The science of bibliometrics allows scientific influence to be measured (Smith & Hazelton 2011a, 2011b, Oermann 2012), for example by the number of times a particular article is cited by other articles (the citation count) or via overall measures of the influence of journals, such as the impact factor (IF) (Ironside 2007). This has led to debate over whether nurses should be publishing in ‘impactful’ journals (Johnstone 2007), whether the discipline is disadvantaged by this (Crookes et al.…”