Nursing dissertations in Japan, 1993–2006: State of the art

Abstract

The first nursing doctoral program in Japan was established in 1988 at St Luke’s College of Nursing, Tokyo. By 2006, that number had increased to 39. It is anticipated that the number of PhD programs will continue to increase, with a goal of graduating 288 students per year with a PhD in nursing. Given the socioeconomic changes in Japan and the need for nurses to be able to contribute to citizens’ health and quality of life, the government has given high priority to developing nursing scientists. To gain a deeper understanding of the contributions and potential contributions that novice nurse researchers have made, we investigated the scope of nursing dissertations in Japan. We gathered dissertation data from three sources: the Doctoral Dissertation Bibliographic Database, National Diet Library (NDL), and the National Institute of Informatics. These systems deliver books, publications, booklets, and reports to the NDL. In Japan, each school is encouraged to deliver their dissertation to the NDL, which becomes the central storage institution. We searched for dissertations from nurse scholars who received their doctoral degree in nursing by December 2006. The NDL search system identified 256 dissertations (Appendix I). For this search, we excluded “public health” or “medical” to distinguish nursing from other health-related areas. Next, we gathered: (i) the dissertation abstracts; (ii) the “research method” section from the text; and (iii) the final examination results by the university’s dissertation examiner. These materials were then sorted and grouped by: the number of dissertations, major areas, target groups (subjects), research methods, and concept focus. The final step was to translate the remainder of the titles into English and organize the dissertations by year to increase our understanding of the themes. As a result, there were 256 dissertations from 12 schools (Table 1). The first dissertation was submitted in 1993, 3 years after the first PhD program began in 1988. In Japan, it tends to take 3 years at least to complete the doctoral program. Almost all of the schools have graduates 3 years after they establish their doctoral course. Table 2 presents the major area of research and the publication year. The major area varied widely. The majority of dissertations focused on “adult nursing”, including chronic illness and the acute period, and “community health nursing” (or “community health”), about health concerns related to living in the community. Table 3 also presents the target population. Again, we found a variety of subjects, such as patients, patients’ supporters, nursing providers (nurses, nursing students, etc.). Some research consisted of secondary data sources, such as a review of the literature, materials, and the translation of published books into Japanese. A comparison of the research methods used revealed that there was almost a balance between qualitative and quantitative research: 128 qualitative (50%), 114 quantitative (44%), 10 quantitative and qualitative (4%), and four unclear research methods. Within schools, PhD students tended to use the same research method, particularly qualitative research. Instrument development in a variety of areas accounted for 24 research topics. Nursing care program development accounted for 18 topics. More recent dissertations had an epidemiological focus as evidence-based medicine. Among these, there were six randomized, controlled studies and two cohort studies. Over half (147, 57%) of the dissertations were written only in Japanese and 107 (42%) had both an English and Japanese title. We were able to identify 256 nursing doctoral dissertations between 1993 and 2006 through the NDL. This list does not account for dissertations by nurses completing their degrees in other health-related fields and dissertations completed at foreign universities both prior to and during the 1993 to 2006 time frame. Nursing scholars are increasing in Japan. Research to improve the health of the citizens is growing and, in general, is written only in Japanese. To strengthen international collaboration and enrich nursing scholarship and contributions nationally and globally, it is important that Japanese nursing scholars also publish their research in English. One of our main goals is to provide timely encouragement and support to these nursing scholars to publish their research as an original manuscript in the Japan Journal of Nursing Science.