More than the sum of its parts

Congratulations to the Journal of Advanced Nursing on its 30th anniversary! Congratulations to nurses and midwives around the globe for their support and encouragement over the years, whether serving as editors, authors, reviewers, editorial board members or loyal readers of JAN. Congratulations also to the staff at Blackwell Publishing, past and present, for their unfailing support and major contributions to the success of JAN. Over 30 years, JAN has grown in size and stature. From a relatively modest start in 1976, when JAN became the United Kingdom's first ‘home-grown’ peer-reviewed nursing journal, to 2006 when JAN is a leading international nursing journal with an Impact Factor within the top ten of ISI 's global ranking. My own involvement with JAN began when I was appointed Editor in July 1997. It was a daunting experience to assume day-to-day responsibility from an Editor as experienced and successful as James P. Smith. Nevertheless, staff at Blackwell Publishing took the view that a journal thrives and grows with change, particularly when a discipline such as nursing was continuing to develop and mature as a profession and they encouraged me to view the journal ‘in the round’, and to introduce measures that would prepare JAN for a new millennium. Looking back now at my Editor's annual reports over my 5 years with JAN is a reminder of just how many changes were introduced, and just how busy that quinquennium was in practice. I will try to give a flavour of some of those developments and conclude with some more esoteric reflections on what the role of an editor involves. There were two immediate practical concerns that I addressed at the start of my period as Editor. First, JAN's valued eclecticism required some form of organization and control in terms of grouping published articles under thematic headings. How to help readers access the information of relevance to them more quickly and provide links across the papers included in each issue? Resolving this concern proved to be surprisingly easy despite an initial fear that we might be expected by the profession ‘at large’ to use ‘medical’ definitions, for example, specialty labels such as paediatric or emergency nursing. I met with Dr Lynda Law Harrison, my editorial colleague and Editor for the Americas in Vancouver, where we both were attending the 1997 ICN Quadrennial Congress, and we discovered immediate unanimity on the subject of grouping articles. Later agreed by the Editorial Board, the nine original thematic headings ranged from ‘Issues and innovations in nursing practice’ to ‘Experience before and throughout the nursing career’. Papers began to be grouped in the first issue that I edited in full, published in July 1998. My accompanying editorial [28(1), 1–2] noted that ‘(T)his classification is not without its potential problems’. Yet, only one category did not prove to be frequently enough used and the only other change has been the merging of ‘Health and nursing policy’, with ‘Management issues’. The 1-year time gap between agreement on the thematic classification of manuscripts and their appearance in JAN also characterized our second practical concern – that authors commonly were experiencing a 12-month wait for the publication of their papers following acceptance. Solved initially by increasing the number of papers in each monthly issue, the result was that JAN became more like a book than a journal! Aware that this density of reading matter was probably a disincentive to many readers, and in order to provide a quicker publishing service to authors and readers, the decision to go twice monthly from January 2001 was agreed. The new pressure on deadlines meant increased work for the whole editorial and production team but this innovation, apart from losing the picture on the front cover in 2003, has stood the test of time. Other changes during those early years of my period as Editor included a transfer of operations from JAN's original London base to Blackwell Publishing's head office in Oxford. There, the development of the electronic aspects of journal production began to proceed apace and communications among and between the editorial and production teams became easier with e-mail, although manuscripts and peer-reviews were still handled in hard copy. Crucially dependent on a team of willing peer-reviewers, we constantly sought to increase and refresh internationally JAN's panel of reviewers. By 2001, there were more than 800 subject reviewers on the database and 10 specialist statistical reviewers. In 2000, Christine Webb joined JAN as Associate Editor and when, the following year, she became the Editor, I was appointed as JAN's Editor-in-Chief. The editorial team now included Roger Watson (Media Reviews) and G. Hussein Rassool (Current Issues and Forthcoming Events), and Andrea Baumann took over as Editor for the Americas following Beverly Henry's move to Asia. Otherwise, this team remained unchanged until the end of my term. Together with a supportive editorial board we saw through the consolidation of all of the initiatives I have described above, and we continuously reviewed and implemented a stream of administrative changes. It was a momentously busy 5-year period. But just what is the role of editor? Having moved on in 2003 to edit the International Council of Nurses’ journal published by Blackwell –International Nursing Review– I am confident that every journal will be different for each editor. Certainly, a journal can be ‘steered’ by an editor in terms of their own values and beliefs. If a journal is not to become a mere collection of articles, then its identity must be forged by editorial policy. JAN is not affiliated to any professional organization; therefore, it carries no brief other than that contained within its own Aims and Scope. I had long seen JAN's diverse and eclectic content as an opportunity for advancing nursing in the global environment. In May 2001 [34(4), 421], the Aims and Scope for JAN were changed to reflect an emphasis on inclusiveness and diversity amongst nurses and midwives around the world. In consolidating this view, the new wording referred to the editorial team not seeking ‘to impose one model for practice’. The revised Aims and Scope also stated that ‘nursing is what different nurses do at different times and in different places. It is advanced nursing when nurses question their practice within its specific cultural, political, economic, social and technological context, asking whether their practice is as effective, efficient and compassionate as possible, given the particular circumstances.’ Despite the undoubted, enormous variations in what is practically possible in nursing, it is also my belief that there are an infinite number of concepts that link nurses around the world. It seemed to me that JANwas the articles that appeared in each issue, not simply in their own right but also in terms of their connecting concepts. Throughout my 5 years with the journal, therefore, I mainly focused my editorials on the articles that appeared in each issue, attempting to elucidate some of the key concepts that they contained in my regular column, ‘In this issue of JAN’. It seemed that these concepts could provide a unifying framework for nursing as a profession, and that they should be explored in nursing research across the many boundaries that both unite and divide us, socio-economic and geographical as well as clinical. One way that this is already happening is with nurses developing the International Classification for Nursing Practice (International Council of Nurses 2005). I feel sure that if nurses would only struggle with these unifying ideas, then many of the ‘medical’ categories that frequently divide us would become redundant. At the same time, nurses themselves have to carry out and publish the results of their enquiries; editors can only suggest and encourage. It is these individual, esoteric aspects of a journal's profile that characterises the editor's input rather than the purely administrative tasks. If nurses recognize this characteristic, then a nursing journal becomes not just a collection of articles but instead an entity where the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. This was my endeavour when I was privileged to act as Editor-in-Chief of JAN.

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