Abstract
I do not know when exactly what we now describe as nursing research first appeared. We all know about Florence Nightingale’s use of statistics and her attractive coxcomb diagrams, but the occupation of nurse researcher and the promotion of the activity probably dates from the 1950s through to the 1980s. For American nurses Afaf Meleis and Jacqueline Fawcett writing in the 1980s, developing theory was a crucial part of what they saw as the ‘evolution’ of nursing. If the profession could be seen to be based on scientific knowledge it would be more likely to have an accepted place in the country’s universities and its practitioners a more assured status (Fawcett, 1984; Meleis, 1985). Most definitions of ‘profession’ include some suggestion of the need for a unique knowledge base. The writers I mention above saw the foundation of the journal Nursing Research in the mid-1950s as a milestone in the establishment of nursing’s scientific knowledge base, and in fact they strongly believed in the centrality of theory to nursing practice.
So for nursing and other practice disciplines – the most obvious being social work and teaching – research and theory-building have become integral parts of a professionalisation strategy. It is of little surprise then to see the burgeoning number of research journals and theoretical articles within them. (I did not include medicine just now as my sense is that biomedical research has, by and large, a rather more direct connection with the world of practice.) The tendency for researchers in these practice disciplines to pursue work of intellectual challenge rather than answering the basic questions that service managers and practitioners are said to be asking is not hard to understand. Putting aside the inconvenient point that it is possible to do both in the same body of work, the incentives to fashion fantastic new bricks, to use Gary Rolfe’s quotation, rather than build a new wash block are clearly in operation. PhD training is focused on generating so-called new knowledge; journals prefer, in fact often demand, innovation in theory; and panellists in various national research competitions are on the lookout for originality. Added to this, many academics say a prayer of thanks each day that they work in a university rather than in the hard-pressed world of practice where you have to show up at 7.30 in the morning. It could be that at least some nurse researchers do not feel steered away from pursuing practice-relevant research by unwelcome university incentive systems.
Academic publishing is also, of course, big business – not just for the publishers, who make a profit from the efforts of state-funded scholars, but for those who purport to assess and measure their work. No wonder no one is calling for fewer journals or less research.