Celebrate the Past and Look to the Future

Abstract

Happy birthday to us! 2019 marks the 15th year of JNP: the Journal for Nurse Practitioners! Founding Editor Marilyn Edmunds’ vision of a professional journal for nurse practitioners (NPs) that focused on all aspects of practice has become a resource for many health care providers (not just NPs) around the world, with a circulation of more than 100,000. Check out this link for a visual image of our reach (https://journalinsights.elsevier.com/journals/1555-4155/downloads). This is my first full edition as JNP’s Editor in Chief, and we welcome new Associate Editor Leslie Neal-Boylan, too. Many of you are familiar with me as I have been the associate editor for the past 4 years. I am a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Nursing and a coach in the Duke Johnson & Johnson Nurse Leadership Program. My practice has been primarily in pediatrics and women’s health. I truly enjoy mentoring others in scholarly writing. Leslie Neal-Boylan is the associate dean for academic affairs and program innovation and professor in the MGH Institute of Health Professions School of Nursing in Boston. She is a family nurse practitioner with an active clinical practice at Tufts Medical Center Community Care in Malden, Massachusetts. Dr. Neal-Boylan has served in a variety of academic roles, including faculty, department chair, associate dean, and dean. She has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and 10 books, including Clinical Cases for the Family Nurse Practitioner. Three of her books have received AJN Book of the Year awards. She also has been an editorial board member and manuscript reviewer for a variety of peer reviewed journals and continues to serve in those roles. Together we should make a great team! We pledge to uphold JNP’s legacy while adapting to current and future trends in health, health care, policy and politics, practice and publishing. Helping you disseminate all the ways you care for patients and how your practice, research, and advocacy make a difference will be a priority for us. However, we at JNP can’t do it alone. We need you to work together with us. We hope that the same spirit that you have to be a preceptor to a student, to teach new NPs the ropes, and to advocate for your patients and each other will also motivate you to participate in scholarship by volunteering to be a reviewer and submitting your work for publication at www.evise.com/profile/#/JNP/login. Take a look at our author guidelines at www.npjournal.org/content/authorinfo and see what type of article is the best fit for your work. We have lots of resources available at Elsevier to help you (https://researcheracademy.elsevier.com ). Here are two examples. If you are not sure how to review an article, see https://researcheracademy.elsevier.com/navigating-peer-review/becoming-peer-reviewer. If you are a first-time author, look here (https://researcheracademy.elsevier.com/writing-research/writing-skills for guidance. JNP also prides itself on a fast time from submission to first decision (an average of < 3 weeks in 2017); if a final acceptance decision (< 6 weeks in 2017) is made, your corrected article will then be available online as an article in press with a DOI that allows it to be fully searchable. We also have many new ways to track the impact of your article and the message you want to communicate beyond the traditional citation metric. PlumX Metrics (https://plumanalytics.com/learn/about-metrics/) tracks your work using 5 different metrics:1.Usage lets you know if anyone is using your article now and includes clicks, views and downloads2.Captures tells you that someone has saved the link to your work so that he or she can come back to it later such as bookmarks, favorites or other saving mechanisms3.Mentions include when your article is referred to by someone else, like the news media or an electronic post like a blog, comments or Wikipedia reference4.Social media include shares, likes, comments and tweets that refer to your work5.Citations, the traditional metric, are expanded to include citations outside of traditional research databases, too. The advantage for you is that you can demonstrate the impact of your work sooner and in more diverse ways than you could in the past. You can find out more about JNP metrics from our website or at https://www.journals.elsevier.com/the-journal-for-nurse-practitioners. Keep improving practice!