Growing scholarship in Nursing & Health Sciences from around the world

Dear readers,

Well, here we are again, in the last issue of Nursing & Health Sciences (NHS) for 2011. The year has gone so fast for me, with the need to oversee a growing number of submissions of manuscripts arriving daily on our online ScholarOne system. It is with great satisfaction and pride that I congratulate our authors, and encourage our would-be authors. Writing for journal publication to international standards, especially in a second language, is often very difficult and highly competitive. There is a great range of articles for you to read and digest in this issue, and our first authors come from 13 countries. How different from those original issues published back in 1999 when most authors mainly were from just three countries: Japan, the USA, and Australia. In 1999, volume 1 had 261 pages and a larger print font, compared to the smaller font of the 540 pages in volume 13 this year. Rapid publication online now means that articles are printed sooner, making scholarship more contemporary and accessible to those with a computer, and how the scholarship has improved! I think authors are now writing to much higher standards, especially in nursing, where education and research have grown around the world, not to mention other health disciplines.

NHS still has a small impact factor, but is growing in popularity and stature. At the 2011 annual meeting of our Nursing & Health Sciences Society here in Yamaguchi, Japan, we heard from Peter D'Onghia of Wiley-Blackwell that NHS is now distributed to 23,968 institutions globally through licensed sales and EBSCOHost. (EBSCOHost is an online database of thousands of academic and popular periodicals, many of which, like NHS, are fully digitized so that readers can get the entire article). No wonder we are getting busier in our Editorial Office. I pay tribute to the help of Junko Maeda, our Editorial Officer, and the growing numbers of Editorial Board Members and guest reviewers from around the world who volunteer their time and expertise to review articles. Our Board has grown to the extent that it is no longer possible to list all names on the inside cover of NHS from 2012, but you will still be able to find Board Members on the journal homepage. Thanks are given to our publishing team at Wiley-Blackwell who do a great job of helping us get to print and circulated around the world.

The majority of articles in this issue are research focused, on a wide range of topics, including the testing of scales; nursing history; patient safety and nursing quality; the various roles of nurses and midwives; clinical competency; concerns about workplaces; recruitment and retention; health promotion; systematic reviews; various health issues, such as cardiovascular disease and breast cancer; as well as an article on nurse education. The debates continue regarding bibliometrics and impact factors in nursing and the health science journals, so I invited two well-known scholars to write a paper on this for this issue.

Finally, this year, like other years, has proved to be both rewarding and challenging for many. However, in 2011, there have been some terribly tragic periods with the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami here in Japan, and many other disasters, wars, and revolutions around the globe. So it is with heartfelt feelings at year's end that I wish all of you peaceful, safe, productive, and satisfying times ahead.