I am very proud to report that, in 2020, the Journal of Neuroscience Nursing (JNN) received more than 200 submissions. We accept approximately 60 articles each year. Therefore, any given author has roughly a 30% chance that their submission will be accepted for publication. A 70% rejection rate is actually considered to be a healthy metric for our journal. The increase in submissions means two things at once. First, it means that the editorial team can be a little more critical about what we publish. Second, it means people want to publish in our journal; people want to share neuroscience nursing knowledge.
In my mind, there is one and only good reason to publish in JNN-you are building the body of neuroscience nursing knowledge. You have content that is important to neuroscience nurses. You have discovered some tidbit of information that you feel compelled to share with the neuroscience nursing audience. Let me interject here to state clearly that you do not need to be a nurse to read JNN or to publish in JNN. We have a blinded review process. We have, and will continue to have, authors and readers who are not nurses. However, the focus of the JNN is nursing, and therefore, the content should inform nursing. And this is where I get a bit perplexed.
Every month, I get at least 1 submission that does not mention nursing or nurses. I get at least half-a-dozen submissions that have zero nursing citations. Some of these are from physicians, but some are from nurses. So I have to ask, "Why would a nursing author want to publish a nursing research study in a nursing journal and not cite nursing literature?" There are more than 100 peer-reviewed nursing journals. The JNN has published continuously for more than 50 years. Although not impossible, I find it hard to believe that any topic of interest to JNN readers has never ever been discussed (directly or indirectly) in JNN or another nursing journal.
After years of thinking about this, I think the answer falls to how nurses view ourselves as a profession. We often see the physician as a hierarchical figure. We listen more intently as the attending MD instructs her team during rounds. When listening to arguments, we have a tendency to give street cred to the MDs but demand irrefutable evidence from our fellow RNs. We have to stop this behavior.
The journal is on track to see a record number of submissions in 2021. I cannot imagine a nurse or a neurosurgeon who would publish in a neurosurgical journal and fail to cite relevant neurosurgical literature. I expect the same level of respect. If we are to build the body of nursing knowledge, we must seek out and understand the knowledge that has been developed and published by our nursing colleagues. Citing relevant literature should include nursing literature. This is not a statement against citing medical literature; it is a statement to recognize the valuable contributions from our own profession. Just as I expect to read nursing citations in medical journals, I expect to read medical citations in nursing journals.