Editorial

EDITORIAL

Research activity in nursing intensified in Brasil as of the 1970s, with the emergence of Master's Courses in Nursing. But its consolidation and strengthening occurred in the following decades, with the creation of Doctorate Programs and the increase in research financing through organizations providing grants, especially the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico - CNPq) and the Coordination for Higher Education Personnel Improvement (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES). Beyond these, other aspects contributed so that research amplified its visibility, such as carrying out National Nursing Research Seminars (Seminários Nacionais de Pesquisa em Enfermagem - SENPEs) as of 1979, the increment of Brazilian Nursing Conferences, and especially the distribution and socialization of research results in health care and nursing national and international periodicals. This last contribution significantly increased its scale of publications in the last decade.

Texto & Contexto Nursing Journal, since its inception, has assumed the importance of published thematic issues of research in nursing and health care in 1994, 2000 (Interinstitutional Master's), 2003, 2006, 2007, and this 2008 issue, in which links what the scientific community has qualitatively produced in the areas in which nursing has social and research insertion. In this current issue, for example, 20 manuscripts will be published, of which 12 are related to adult and elderly nursing care, to management in nursing and health care, to women's and children's health, to ethics in care, and to general care, with the other 8 manuscripts concerning methodological aspects in nursing and health care research

More than the remaining themes linked to health care, research becomes a main character and makes critical and current support of the research references possible, as much for Undergraduate Courses and Lato and Stricto Sensu Graduate Programs, as for practical care, considering the possibility that articles of this nature offer syntheses about themes in question, for example: focus groups, data analysis in research, systematic review, integrative review, and action-research.

One of the questions to consider concerns how to make this knowledge truly viable and visible within the scientific community and beyond. Among the forms which periodicals have adopted - and which Texto & Contexto Nursing Journal has precedence - are insertion of the periodical in international indexes, considered qualitatively to be "the best", a policy of open access, a policy of ample reachable spectrum, and that its articles are made available in more than one language (unfortunately, this last item is only considered essential for Spanish or Portuguese speaking countries). Thus nursing research may have a readership and an advance oriented to global health.¹ When one talks about health, necessarily one touches upon the points of multidisciplinary and inter-frontier confluence within studies which deal with health problems as a global component, in which there is the possibility for one country to learn from others in order to resolve similar health care problems through the applicability of research results. The visibility of nursing research from this point of view is influenced as well by the manner nursing research socializes knowledge and promotes the reduction of knowledge frontiers, many times the victim of language barriers and manners of presenting the individual and global health care realities.

We hope that through Texto & Contexto Nursing Journal, as well as through other periodicals, nursing research may be given more incentive and better promoted in a way to reduce these frontiers not only among the formal scientific community - in its majority linked to Graduate Programs - but also among practicing nurses. Our hope is that they may implement research results in their daily practice in a way which qualifies health and nursing care, thus producing new knowledge based on their own nursing practice.

Thus, research would and will reach the greatest of its propositions; to impact practice, which is so essential and necessary to its transformation and advance. In order to finalize this editorial, I quote Eliot Freidson, in which he discusses expertise as an instrument of professional power, and consequently the quality of knowledge production in nursing is one of the guarantees of professional value and recognition.

"Knowledge in and of itself does not offer special power; only exclusive knowledge gives power to its holders. Such power is obtained precisely in the occupational principle of organization, to which recruiting, training, and the work performance of creating, disseminating, and applying knowledge are controlled by the 'knowledge occupations'" ^2:104

Maria Itayra Padilha, PhD

- Associate Professor of Nursing Departament and Nursing Graduate Program at the Federal University of Santa Catarina. Pos-Doctorat of Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing at University of Toronto. Leader of the Research Group on the History of Nursing Knowledge (GEHCE). National Council for Scientific and Technological Development Researcher( CNPq)- Productivity in 1D Research -

REFERENCES

• 1. Jairath N. Global Health: The role of nursing research. Nurs Res. 2007 Nov-Dec; 56(6):367-8.
• 2. Freidson E. Renascimento do profissionalismo: teoria, profecia e política. São Paulo (SP): Edusp, 1998.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  13 Jan 2009
• Date of issue
  Dec 2008