Response to Wallhagen

Article Outline

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Editors' response:

Dr. Wallhagen's criticism of the paucity of authors from disciplines other than nursing for the articles in the May/June issue of Nursing Outlook is right on! We had hoped that each article would have a multidisciplinary authorship and encouraged the lead authors to collaborate widely. Unfortunately, a variety of factors intervened so that our hope was not fulfilled. We agree that the articles that did have multidisciplinary authorship not only practice what we are preaching but provide a richer perspective on each topic.

One of us (PM) did not contribute a planned article to the issue after finding that one of her colleagues in another profession was unwilling to publish in a nursing journal prior to publishing at least some aspect of this work in the primary journal of the other discipline. While this was most disappointing and differs from my experience with colleagues from that same profession, it illustrates the silos in which we all still live. More recently, I was invited to be part of a panel on patient-centered care at a forum oriented to physician leaders. Again, I found that the bibliography provided to the participants was comprised of research and commentary almost exclusively from medical journals—despite the fact that a majority of articles in the > 7000 PubMed citations on the topic are from nursing journals.

These experiences are disappointing, but are not cause to give up the goal of increasing interdisciplinary work, participated in and led by nurse clinicians and scientists. Rather, they illustrate that we do have a continuing challenge to alert our colleagues in other professions regarding the high quality (technically known as impact factor) of many journals oriented to nursing. We also have an obligation to bring our work to the attention of these other professions by publishing the research in those journals as well. All of the authors whose articles are in this special issue have been particularly skillful at this multidisciplinary publishing. But, we do need to continue to bring our interdisciplinary colleagues into the journals frequented by nursing as well.