The conception of empirical nursing has been disseminated, based on "doing", updated according to professional practice, impairing the interdisciplinarity between care, research and the building of a specific knowledge able to provide scientificity to its actions. Thus, authors aimed at understanding nurses' conceptions on care and research, analyzing their practices and verifying if they are complementary or exclusionary. They used participant observation and semi-structured interviews with nurses working at a University Hospital located in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Results showed different discourses on care and research as well as the difficulties to associate these activities that, for nurses, are theoretically complementary but practically exclusionary.
research; nursing; knowledge
