What makes a good reviewer?
Article information
Nursing has existed as an academic field since the beginning of Korea’s modernisation and has made remarkable progress. It has been approximately 60 years since Korea started training nurses at universities and about 40 years since the country began producing PhD-prepared nurses equipped with research skills. During this period, the number of nursing schools and clinical facilities in Korea has grown considerably. Currently, there are 196 nursing schools and around 370,000 registered nurses nationwide.
The Korean Society of Nursing Science has followed the same trajectory in terms of its establishment and growth. For 53 years, it has spearheaded research and academic initiatives, with its affiliated professional societies also producing numerous scientific journals, thanks to the dedicated efforts of nurse scholars.
Child Health Nursing Research (CHNR), a premier journal among professional societies, was established in 1995 and is now 29 years old. Since its inception, it has published outstanding research in the field of child health nursing. It became a KCI (Korea Citation Index)-listed journal in 2007 and was included in Scopus in 2018.
Just as Korean society is experiencing a slowdown in the growth curve of socio-economic development, many indicators suggest that the nursing community may not see the high growth rates of the past. Several factors contribute to this trend, but a primary concern is the disconnect between research and education in nursing—an applied discipline—and practical application. For nursing to advance as a profession and evolve into the human caring science of the future, it is essential to establish a virtuous cycle. This cycle should involve the direct application of nursing research to clinical practice, alongside the investigation of unresolved clinical issues through further research. Moreover, the insights gained from such research should be integrated into the curricula of educational institutions to benefit nursing students.
However, the overwhelming majority of hospitals still adhere to the 19th-century hospital system, which predominates the practice settings our nursing students are expected to enter upon graduation. Achieving the ideal virtuous cycle of research, education, and practice is challenging within these systems. Nevertheless, the reason we conduct research and publish in esteemed journals like CHNR is that we share the common goal of eventually establishing this ideal framework. We need to develop a system where nurses can design and implement patient-centred care and document the outcomes in CHNR, thereby gathering evidence on the effectiveness of nursing practices.
To make progress toward the above goals, it is crucial for reviewers to be able to discern the best manuscripts from the multitude submitted to CHNR. What characteristics define an effective reviewer?
First, a good reviewer should be knowledgeable about the philosophical and historical background of the discipline of nursing. Unlike neighbouring disciplines such as medicine, public health, psychology, and sociology, nursing emerged later and is distinct in its practical orientation, necessitating adaptation to the rapidly evolving healthcare landscape. Understanding the origins of nursing and its unique philosophical underpinnings is crucial for reviewers to effectively select and assess papers that capture the distinctiveness of the field.
To further refine the discussion, we can ask: what is at the heart of nursing’s uniqueness? At its core, nursing is centred on human beings, with the primary goal of nursing research being to explore methods to alleviate human suffering. This focus clearly sets it apart from medicine, its closest related discipline, which aims to identify and treat diseases. The differences between nursing and other fields, such as public health, psychology, and sociology, are so pronounced that they require no additional elaboration. Despite the diversity of specialisations within nursing and the various types of research conducted, the overarching message should remain straightforward: it must aim to alleviate the suffering of the ill. This is the essence of nursing.
The second competency of a good reviewer is the ability to assess the practical applicability of the article under review. Nursing is an academic discipline that scientifically contextualises the caregiving work of nurses for patients. Research that lacks practical application or is disconnected from nursing practice does not contribute meaningfully to the field of nursing research. At the heart of nursing practice is the “compassionate presence” that nurses offer their patients [1]. We should select papers that have the potential to be applied in practice and publish them in CHNR to accumulate evidence of nursing practice.
Finally, an effective reviewer must possess the ability to recognise papers that embody the unstoppable force of transformative change. Nightingale stressed that nursing is a discipline at risk of regression unless we consistently incorporate this transformative change into our daily practice, as expressed by the following quote:
“For us who Nurse, our Nursing is a thing, which, unless in it we are making progress every year, every month, every week, take my word for it we are going back. The more experience we gain, the more progress we can make” [2].
To ensure that the reviewers of CHNR progressively develop the above three competencies, the leaders of the journal should emphasise these competencies through opportunities such as conferences and faculty workshops.
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Authors' contribution
All the work was done by Eunyoung Suh.
Conflict of interest
No existing or potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.
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Please contact the corresponding author for data availability.
Acknowledgements
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