Prevention and treatment of disease and disability, understanding symptoms and creating effective therapeutics for symptom management in acute and chronic illness, and compassion interventions for end-of-life and palliative care are all priority areas for nursing research, as articulated in "Bringing Science to Life," the current strategic plan for the U.S. National Institute of Nursing Research (2011). Full scientific understanding in all these priority areas as a basis for practice requires use of the complete range of biological, psychological, social, and spiritual perspectives on health in context across the life span.
The explosive pace of advances in basic biology in the genomic era (Guttmacher & Collins, 2003) is providing new ways to explore the processes of health even as they present a challenge for nurse investigators to be fully informed about current knowledge in biology with relevance to nursing research. For this reason, Nursing Research has established an open-ended call for integrative review articles focused on advances in biology for nursing research. Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following: genetics, genomics, and epigenetics; systems biology/integrative physiology; physiology in situ and mobile health devices; neuroscience and imaging; computational biology; microbiology and the human microbiome; behavioral biology for the science of behavior change; and nanoscience.
Reviews should summarize and critically evaluate the current state of knowledge and clearly address implications for nursing research. Biology Reviews will be published as they are accepted as features in regular issues of Nursing Research. Authors are encouraged to submit a query to the Editor (mailto:[email protected]) in advance of submission; an abstract of the proposed article should be included with the query. Biology Reviews will provide up-to-date information about advances in biology to the global community of nurse scientists, with the aim of infusing new biological knowledge into nursing research.
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