It is my greatest honor, pleasure, and excitement to succeed Dr Chinn in continuing the legacy of Advances in Nursing Science (ANS). Throughout nursing history, ANS has always been the premier journal that challenges granted assumptions, injustice, and power imbalances and brings provoking, highly innovative, and creative perspectives to nursing discipline. Under the strong leadership of Dr Peggy Chinn, ANS was founded in 1978 and has stayed as the leading journal in highly innovative, thought-provoking, and boundary-breaking scholarships in nursing.
As all of us know, Dr Chinn has been an extremely productive and inspiring thought leader, theorist, and meta-theorist in nursing for the past several decades. While reading her blog posting, titled "The History and Future of Advances in Nursing Science," I could feel the atmosphere when ANS was founded, and I could understand what kinds of challenges she needed to go through to initiate and raise this cutting-edge journal. Without knowing this background history, I first met ANS when I was a BSN student at Seoul National University in South Korea in 1980s while taking a nursing theory class for the first time. Then, ANS has inspired me during my master's and PhD classes in 1990s, and I have been a fan of all the thought-provoking theoretical works published in ANS throughout my nursing career. I just have taken it for granted that ANS has always been there for us. However, obviously, it was not possible without Dr Chinn's endless efforts with all our thought leaders throughout the history of ANS.
The legacy of ANS lies in the fact that ANS has been always on the frontline of nursing science. Most of the landmark, thought-provoking articles related to nursing knowledge generation have been published in ANS as I remember. Most of prominent theoretical, philosophical, and scholarly works in nursing have been published in ANS, which is the reason that ANS is one of the most-read and most-assigned journals by faculties of graduate programs in nursing. The authors of articles in ANS included nationally and internationally renowned nursing scholars, theorists, philosophers, and researchers such as our famous grand theorists, middle-range theorists, situation-specific theorists, meta-theorists, feminists, social critical theorists, post-modernists, womanists, and so on. As an author, ANS has been the first journal that I targeted to publish my theoretical and philosophical works and boundary-breaking conceptual and methodological articles.
In recent years, nursing discipline has gone through multiple expected and unexpected changes, which include the impending retirement of senior nursing scholars and researchers, changes in characteristics of nursing students and nursing workforce, advances in technologies, heightened health disparities and social injustice, drastic changes in dissemination practices of emerging nursing scholars, and all unanticipated alterations due to the COVID-19. At the same time, there have been drastic changes in the directions of nursing knowledge generation with the new leadership at the National Institutes of Health including the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR), which may be consistent with the directions that ANS has aimed throughout the past several decades (eg, social justice, health equity). Also, nursing discipline has been drastically globalized with advances in communication technologies, and there is a clear need for collaborative knowledge generation in the global nursing community. This is the time to come out of Western-dominated knowledge generation in nursing. Subsequently, the vision and mission of the journal need to be evolved with the consequent changes in knowledge generation and knowledge translation in nursing.
As the new editor-in-chief of ANS, I plan to make necessary changes while maintaining the legacy of ANS. In my first year, I want to aim 2 changes in ANS. First, I will aim to incorporate the edge-running ideas in nursing knowledge generation in the direction of ANS through widely reaching out to the scholars/researchers in the emerging fields. Also, I will aim to extend the audience of ANS to the global nursing community while involving more international nursing scholars in ANS. Please stay tuned for future changes, but note that ANS will continue to be the premier nursing journal on the frontline that challenges the status quo of nursing and advances nursing science.
Again, I really appreciate Dr Chinn's unyielding, continuous, highly innovative efforts made for ANS during the past several decades. Also, I really appreciate her strong support during this transition. Dr Chinn has generously shared all her wisdom and advice during this transition, and I could see how much she was dedicated to ANS and how strongly she believed in nursing scholarship. More importantly, I want to say thanks to all the authors, editorial advisory board members, editorial review board members, all the readers of ANS, and, of course, our highly supportive publisher, Wolters Kluwer. All of you have made the legacy of ANS. I will look forward to working with you to continue the legacy of ANS.
-Eun-Ok Im, PhD, MPH, RN, CNS, FAAN
Editor