The production of knowledge and the strategies to incorporate results into the practice of nursing

A few principles and concepts lead us to think the strategies used by the field of Nursing have helped embed research results into clinical practice.

Science is a tool through which mankind seeks to give meaning to nature and its phenomena by means of investigations based on a systematic, safe method. As an essentially dynamic process, science evolves as it is challenged, checked, and confronted by new ideas put forward by the scientific community in its disclosure process¹.

At first, scientific communications were carried out via direct correspondence between peers or verbal presentations at scientific societies’ meetings. As such sharing evolved into journal publication, scientific knowledge has become an essential input for scientific development, updates, and advances, along with academic practice².

The journals’ transition into an electronic format allows the scientific community to share their findings at a speed that is unprecedented in the history of written communications. The ability to obtain real-time knowledge has brought nursing education continued updates based on the evidence published. Additionally, graduate Nursing programs have driven the production of science and advances in this field of knowledge.

While Bibliometrics measures the impact of the available literature or its usage by researchers, other theories and ideas seek to organize how scientific production is measured and shared. New information technology tools such as Scientometrics, Webometrics, and Altmetrics make it possible to map and combine research results and social and academic relationships to create new ways for measuring their impact and use by society³.

It should be noted that, most often than not, the knowledge produced in the field of Nursing will have an impact on people’s health conditions, care, and training. In the few past decades, instructors and students have usually steered their practice based on the literature that generates the best evidence to ensure patient safety and shared decisions, while preserving the ethics and patients’ right to choose.

Some of the Nursing production can be considered “Invisible Science” because it has been neglected when it comes to obtaining grants from research funding agencies which mistakenly see this production as low-impact, even though Brazilian Nursing has the highest number of scientific papers published in highly selective Latin American journals. These studies which are deemed lower-impact by funding agencies are likely to be the ones that bring about changes to society, habits, and later on, public policy.

Aware of this gap between nursing research funding and value, researchers in the field do not get disheartened. They conduct their studies even without grants and share the benefits of nursing studies on the population’s health in national and international journals.

Although there are no metrics to measure whether the knowledge produced in the field has been put into practice, the aging population, longer life expectancy, and lower maternal, neonatal, and child mortality rates lead us to believe scientific efforts in the field of Nursing have contributed to (perhaps even played a major role in) decreasing the population’s morbidity and mortality and improving clinical practice at all levels of care, training, and research.

REFERÊNCIAS

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  Targino MDG. Comunicação científica: uma revisão de seus elementos básicos. Inf Soc: Estud. 2000 [citado 2016 dez 10];10(2):27p. Disponível em: http://www.ies.ufpb.br/ojs2/index.php/ies/article/view/326/248
  » http://www.ies.ufpb.br/ojs2/index.php/ies/article/view/326/248
• ²
  Kuramoto H. Informação científica: proposta de um novo modelo para o Brasil. Ci Inf. 2006 [citado 2016 jun 02];35(2):91-102. Disponível em: http://revista.ibict.br/ciinf/article/view/1144
  » http://revista.ibict.br/ciinf/article/view/1144
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  Mingers J, Leydesdorff L. A review of theory and practice in scientometrics. Eur J Oper Res. 2015 [cited 2016 Dec 10];246(1):1-19. Available from: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037722171500274X
  » http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037722171500274X

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  2016