Team Up und Write I t Up

I f you were the student who earned As on your papers and really enjoyed that feeling, this page is addressed to you. If you are the clinician who has said, “Our system (or care protocol or staffing plan) works really well; we should write this up,” this is for you, too. Yes, I’m asking you to write for publication! It’s good for nursing, and it’s good for your career and your self-image. But here’s the new message: You don’t need to write alone. Find an academic nurse to be your coauthor. This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.

In busy clinical settings, it’s hard to think about writing, but you may have already started. Was there a patient whose situation was so unusual that you did a journal article search and developed a customized plan of care? Did you write a paper for school on a topic that still feels important? Does your agency have a staffing system or docu- mentation approach that your quality improve- ment system shows is really working? Did you read a JOGNN research article and find yourself questioning the clinical recommendations? Any of these can serve as the starting point for a letter or an article.

Locate a professor who shares an interest in your topic and invite her or him to be your coau- thor, in exchange for helping you shape your writ- ing into a manuscript. If you have the original idea and take the lead in doing the work, your name goes first on the article. You will find that the aca- demic nurses who publish in J O G N N , even the ones with many initials after their names, are approachable “regular folks.” Faculty have great respect for their professional colleagues who choose to work in direct patient care. Academic nurses are experienced at writing for publication because it’s part of their jobs, but clinicians know the problems faced in practice and the nursing care approaches that work.

The instructor who brings students to your unit is a possible writing buddy. So is the faculty mem- ber from your own school days. (You’d be amazed at how many of us are still in the same jobs, get- ting older and grayer.) Perhaps you like the articles

by a particular JOGNN author. These days, she or he can be in a distant city, and you can communi- cate and share drafts by e-mail. To find an e-mail address, search for the author’s university online and find the author in the faculty directory.

Make a list of what you have written or could write and get advice from your academic colleague on the best journal and format. You may have great material for a letter to an editor (a short and simple first publication!), a clinical practice inno- vation article, or a summary of the research on a key clinical problem. Once you settle on the type of manuscript you will produce, your academic coauthor can sketch out the outline of the paper in the proper format for that type of publication.

Creating a manuscript does not require bril- liance, just willingness to go to the library, follow an outline, and revise your work. In addition to helping you target and outline your paper, your professor friend can help you find and understand the key research articles on your topic. She or he may take responsibility for doing some of the library work and helping you interpret the studies, while you do the writing about their relevance to practice. As a clinician, you know better than any- one which research findings are really helpful for nurses in settings like yours and which research is still too theoretical to be useful in patient care.

So, you’ve made an agreement with a faculty colleague, you have some materials to work with, and now it’s time to write. Here’s one final hint, to avoid the blank page roadblock. Your first sen- tences are going to tell readers the problem you are writing about, why it’s important, and the pur- pose of your writing. This is like a news interview sound bite, the briefest possible summary of your paper. Explain these three points in three simple sentences, as if you were describing your writing to a relative or a non-nurse friend. Write them down-this is your introductory paragraph. Then get out your outline, and don’t stop writing!

Margaret H. Kearney, RNC, PhD Associate Editor

SepternberlOctober 200 1 JOGNN 461