Articles accepted for publication by the journal cover topics such as human response to illness, acute care research, health promotion, symptom management and cost-effectiveness of nursing care. Published bi-monthly since 1968, Nursing Research prints about 45 articles per year, says Dougherty. In a year's time, she receives over 200 submissions, which are read by the journal's review panel of 300 nurses in educational and practice settings. It can then be evaluated and commented upon. In 2000, the Institute for Scientific Information, a publisher of scholarly bibliographic databases, ranked Nursing Research number one in impact among nursing journals.
Impact refers to the frequency with which journal articles are cited in other publications.
Of the 42 ranked journals, four were research-focused publications. Nursing Research is now published by Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins, which bought the journal in 1996. From its Website, LWW offers full-text copies of journal articles. There has been a lot of activity in the areas of disease prevention, chronic illness management and issues related to aging and geriatrics, so I would expect to see those ways of looking at nursing research brought out in the issue, too.