The funding of nursing research continues to be an issue. Research training initiatives which require a partnership between NHS Trusts, universities and government funding are few in number and are highly competitive. Arrangements for PhD supervision are being increasingly scrutinised by major funding bodies to ensure a quality experience for students. More inter and multi-disciplinary research is evident in the UK nursing literature . The development of the Internet with its capacity to link research centres has facilitated the development of nursing research.
Collaborative projects involving European partners are also more in evidence.
The volume of nursing research activity in the UK continues to increase annually. For many years now, the extent of activity has been beyond quantification or summarisation for this annual report. In 1996, Traynor and Rafferty 4 reviewed the NRR in identifying that 6413 projects were registered on that system. The search for nursing projects therefore conceals the important fact that quantification of nursing research 4 is becoming increasingly problematic as more nurses work in multi-disciplinary research teams on health services research projects, of which only a proportion may involve nursing. However the report did not identify discipline-specific funding and therefore the level of nursing research was unable to be calculated.