The Importance of Publication for Nurses

Author: Ruth Rosenblum, DNP, RN, PNP-BC, CNS

Charting in our modern day is a matter of clicks and tabs. The need for most nurses to?write?has become less and less. This can leave the “writing muscles” stiff and weak, especially if the expectation is academic writing, something that many nurses do not find comfortable or easy.

Graduate school, however, requires that students write. A lot.

In part, that writing is to prepare nurses to contribute to the breadth of knowledge that other nurses rely on for insight, innovation, and improved outcomes. Writing for publication in books and nursing journals is essential to the field of nursing as a whole; it disseminates citable evidence, shares initiatives and innovations outside of intimate networks, provides information to keep frontline nurses up-to-date, and develops the science underpinnings of the nursing profession.

For all of these reasons and more, writing for publication is a key part of the DNP program at SJSU. Students are expected to produce two deliverables by the completion of the five-semester program, which each deliverable being a different take on the writing process.

One is the doctoral project paper, a (usually) lengthy document which includes all aspects of the student’s doctoral project. This is a fairly universal requirement for DNP programs, and students can look forward to recounting the positive change that they made in their community through their doctoral project.

The second deliverable required by the DNP program at SJSU is a manuscript for publication. Students produce this document with the assistance of, at the very least, their project chair. It is usually a smaller scale version of their whole project, and perhaps concentrates on one aspect of their work (depending on the wants and needs of the journal they will submit to). Many of our students from the former DNP Consortium have had articles published (some can been seen on the DNP Alumni page), and many more have presented at Poster Sessions or have given podium presentations on their area of expertise.

The importance of publication cannot be underestimated or overstated. The parable used to be that new information in medicine and nursing took 17 years (!) from start to finish to be published in the literature, mostly via books. Recent changes in publication timelines and the proliferation of online and open-access journals have reduced that time.

Nurses, through research and experience, are founts of valuable information and experience from which colleagues near and far are eager to learn.

Find out more about The Valley Foundation School of Nursing, and its amazing faculty and programs.