Leading International Health Science Journal

What makes the Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences a leading journal? The aim of the journal is to contribute to the development and advancement of scientific knowledge on caring related to health, well-being, illness and the alleviation of human suffering. We realize that caring is a condition for health and well-being. We have various understandings of caring: a caring society, a caring relationship, a caring attitude and so forth. The caring sciences are fields of health science where the approach is mostly naturalistic because experiments cannot provide understanding of patterns of human reactions or may be unethical. The caring sciences are criticized for not providing evidence, however, the reality is that health and well-being are matters of both science and human relationships. This journal represents a nontraditional approach to the understanding of human health where evidence may lay in a testimony, ‘witness’. Nevertheless, the journal has been widely read and cited. The latest Impact Factor for 2004 was 0.857. The Impact Factor is said to probably be the only quantitative way of assessing the worth and relevance of a journal to the academic community it serves. This journal has developed along with the caring sciences in the Nordic countries and internationally. As an established journal it is indexed in all relevant databases where researchers and practitioners search and thereby the published research can be available for citations. The Impact Factor is generally seen as a suitable measure of the value of a journal. The Impact Factor is also used in research assessment exercises which, in many countries, are now being carried out on a formal basis. Authors submitting original research must preferably publish it in a journal with the highest perceived worth possible in order to secure future funding, job promotions and peer recognition. Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences is in the subject categories: Public, Environmental & Occupational Health, where it is ranked as 37th out of 60. Another important factor that contributes to the term ‘Leading International Health Science Journal’ is an extension of the editorial board. In the Nordic College of Caring Sciences the decision to extend the editorial board with seven new members of which four should be members of the Nordic College of Caring Sciences and three invited international scientists was made. The editorial board now has representation of the various options for caring sciences with both a Nordic and international perspective. The new editors are: Nicolle Boumans, Associate Professor, Maastrict Univeristy, Department of Health Organisation, Policy and Economic (HOPE), Maastricht University, The Netherlands. Michael A Carter, Professor, University of Tennessee Health Science Center, USA. Heather F Clarke, Principal, Health and Nursing Policy, Research and Evaluation Consulting, BC, Canada. Sirkka Liisa Ekman, Professor, Karolinska Institute, Neurotec Division of Gerontological Nursing, Sweden. Katie Eriksson, Professor, Department of Caring Sciences, Åbo Academy, Finland. Kjell Kristoffersen, Associate Professor, Bergen University, Department of Public Health and Primary Health Care, Norway. Kirsten Lomborg, Assistant Professor, Department of Nursing Science, Faculty of Health, Aarhus University, Denmark. Kirsten Lomborg was appointed to replace Elisabeth O.C. Hall. Elisabeth O.C. Hall has served as editor for 8 years, two periods of 4 years, which is the maximum time of office on this board. It is my pleasure to welcome all the new editors and I look forward to sharing editorial challenges with each of them. They have all already shown their interest in the journal as authors or referees. I would like to mention that editors do not have special privileges for publishing in this journal. If editors submit manuscripts they will go through the same process of blind review as any other manuscript. In this issue we publish articles by two of the editors Elisabeth O.C. Hall and Nicolle Boumans. Elisabeth O.C. Hall's manuscript was submitted while she was still on the editorial board and Nicolle Boumans' manuscript was submitted before she was asked to become editor. They publish different types of research. Elisabeth O.C. Hall has for a long time had an interest in parents' experiences of having a critically ill child in hospital. For the paper in this issue, thirteen parents were interviewed, and as the title indicates, the parents felt as though they were ‘Being in an alien world’. The methodology is phenomenological, to grasp inner feelings and the pattern of reactions to those feelings. Nicolle Boumans, Afke J.M.B. Berkhout and Jan A. Landeweerd have investigated the effect in quality of care after implementing a resident-oriented care model in nursing homes. Nicolle Boumans used a quasi-experimental design. Nursing homes where the implementation took place were ‘experiments’ and other nursing homes were ‘controls’. I think it is important that we publish research on caring where various designs are used and thereby demonstrate the strengths of the different designs and readers may also find the results complementary to understanding the complexity of caring.

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