As Nurse Educator (NE) enters its 32nd year of publication, it debuts with a new design. Regular readers were probably surprised to see a different look to NE, but it was time for change. The professional life of a journal is similar to a professional career path. When we started our career, we may have thought we were good, but we did not know we were good. We surrounded ourselves with good people, sought mentors, got more education, made mistakes, and learned and developed personally and professionally. We worried about how we were perceived as leaders, faculty, and coaches. Most of us not only survived but also thrived. We loved nursing and we loved teaching. So did NE's founder.
The Past
Nurse Educator was started in 1976 by John Watkins. The journal was managed out of his home in Massachusetts with his family's assistance. John was a visionary. At a time when chief nursing officers were called directors of nursing and wore white uniforms, stockings, and caps, John saw a changing healthcare environment demanding a better educated nurse who would one day be in executive board rooms. The opening paragraph in John's publisher's statement in volume 1, number 1, stated, "Quality nursing care starts with quality nursing education[horizontal ellipsis]Nurse Educator is pledged to becoming a high level source of information on both the practical and theoretical aspects of nursing education[horizontal ellipsis]"Content served the needs of nurse educators in both schools of nursing and hospital staff development. That is still our mission today.
Content was driven by John's vision of the future. John, and everyone with whom he associated to build NE, surrounded themselves with the best and brightest in nursing, asking the unanswered questions and providing innovative, practical content. To assure that the mission of the journal was met, John enlisted the assistance of key nurse educators-the initial advisory board included nursing greats such as Marjorie Beyers, Luther Christman, Dorothy del Bueno, and Madeleine Leininger, as well as authors Margretta Styles, Barbara Stevens, Jannetta MacPhail, Ruth Barney Fine, and Carolyn Cambers Clark.
Back issues of NE present a documented history of not only our concerns over time but also our seemingly never-ending issues. A 1976 cover quote starts, "Simulation games can change student attitudes[horizontal ellipsis]especially timely now when nursing roles are expanding and nursing skills are becoming more complex and demanding, and nurses are striving to assert themselves as peers with other health professionals." Also in 1976, the president of the Robert Woods Foundation, announcing funding for a program to prepare academic leaders in primary care, stated, "clinical primary care nurses, or nurse practitioners, as they are sometimes called, are a new kind of nurse who brings a high level of clinical skill and practice to ambulatory patient care." A cover quote in 1977 states, "Assessment should focus on performance rather than potential."
In the first 2 years of publication (1976-1977), article topics included the need for education-service collaboration, the promotion of interpersonal skills in students, mediated self-instruction of basic nursing skills, contracting for student clinical experience, the teaching-learning process, sexuality in the curriculum, health and illness among ethnic people of color, use of a student-run community agency for clinical experience, and the development of patient teaching objectives and techniques. In 2006, I still received manuscripts on these topics, albeit in a new context, because some topics are seminal to our work as teachers.
Our topic coverage now has moved to pressing issues, such as shortages of faculty; evidence-based practice; all facets of using technology; faculty and students as partners in the educational process; management of faculty workloads; issues generated and compounded by financial constraints; diversity among students, faculty, and patients; and all types of partnerships and collaboratives.
Practicality
Despite changing topics and new slants on old topics, NE's overarching goal is to publish practical content with clearly defined strategies to address problems and issues. We want the articles to be informed by data but to have utilitarian and immediate application value for a busy faculty member looking for a way to bring energy to the learning situation. We want our articles to be adaptable to any level of education setting. We want a reader to finish an article and say, "My students will like doing that" or "That will make my life easier" or "That's a really interesting approach; I could get excited and have fun doing that."
Although we occasionally publish a formal report of research, we do insist that the article conclude with what was done as a result of the data and what the outcomes of that change were. This keeps NE from becoming a research journal and maintains its utilitarian value. After critiquing this editorial for me, NE editorial advisor Janice Beitz, PhD, RN, CS, CNOR, CWOCN, said "The articles are written by faculty who do a great job of taking abstract theory and applying it efficiently and effectively to real-life educational challenges. I fully agree that I take ideas from the journal and try them on in my classroom with great success."
The blend of stability with variability and its practical approach to content is what makes NE what it is today. Although some things are new with this issue, the core values have not changed. When you read the content, you will that know you are reading NE and not some other nursing education journal. Like us in our careers, NE has survived and thrived its early development.
Growing Up
Nurse Educator recently had the honor of being added to the small number of nursing journals indexed and abstracted in the Social Science Index Expanded, Current Contents/Social and Behavioral Sciences, Social Sciences Citation Index, and the Science edition and the Social Sciences edition of Journal Citation Reports. Coverage by these indexes sets the stage for NE to earn a place in the Institute for Scientific Information impact factor list. Subscribers of NE also now have electronic access to archival, searchable, full-text articles dating back to 2001 and abstracts dating back to 1996. Go to http://NurseEducatorOnline.com with the subscription number from your mailing label to access this content. Many faculty, focusing on course content and hundreds of process issues, worry that they are losing their zest for the core part of their job-being a creative, innovative, and interesting teacher. Nurse Educator provides practical content to energize the teacher's spirit in every busy faculty member.
Suzanne P. Smith, EdD, RN, FAAN
Editor-in-Chief