The Journal of School Nursing2020, Vol. 36(6) 407-408© The Author(s) 2020Article reuse guidelines:sagepub.com/journals-permissionsDOI: 10.1177/1059840520965379journals.sagepub.com/home/jsn
We are about to embark on a new year unlike any other in our lifetime. Our ability to thrive on change is an asset, but never before have we been subjected to the frequency and intensity of changes that we experienced over the past year. When we find emails or photos from January and February 2020, it is difficult to reflect on how much has changed. Many of us experienced the loss of family members, colleagues, and friends due to the COVID-19 pandemic. All of us have grieved for the way of life that we enjoyed and took for granted.
The Journal of School Nursing (JOSN) is also undergoing a transition that has not occurred in over a decade. I have accepted the position of Executive Editor following Dr. Julia Cowell’s 11-year tenure at the helm of the National Association of School Nurses’ research and scholarly journal. Dr. Cowell’s scholarship supported her work as an editor. As a researcher, Dr. Cowell was committed to exploring the health of Southeast Asian and Mexican immigrant and refugee school-aged children. Her work expanded the knowledge school nurses need to provide care for these underserved populations.
Dr. Cowell is a highly respected educator and innovative trailblazer. In the 1980s, she developed and delivered the first online school nurse certification program at the University of Illinois Chicago. She later moved to Rush University where she fostered public health research and leadership among masters and doctoral students. Always positive and encouraging, Dr. Cowell is a model for nursing leadership and mentorship. She coached many school nurses and nurse researchers through their first publications. Dr. Cowell endorsed and supported a cadre of emerging nurse leaders, expert clinicians, and nurse scientists who will be advancing school nursing and the health of children for decades to come.
Dr. Cowell brought about significant changes to JOSN, propelling JOSN into a highly visible and prestigious publication that increased the respect and value of school nurses’ clinical practice in the United States and around the globe. One measure of a journal’s quality and status is the impact factor (IF). The IF measures the frequency that articles in a journal are cited over a period of time. Within a category, the IF is used to rank journals on their importance. JOSN was not included in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) the first year Dr. Cowell was Executive Editor. At the time, Thomson Reuters, producer of Institute for Scientific Information’s (ISI) Web of Science, was under pressure from nurses and librarians to add nursing journals to its JCR rankings (Ketefian & Freda, 2009). Nursing scholarly journals were added to the JCR over the next few years (Cáceres et al., 2017), and in 2010, JOSN was included for the first time. An IF of 1.0 means articles published during the preceding 2 years were cited an average of one time (Clarivate Analytics, n.d.). In 2010, JOSN’s IF in that inaugural year was 0.72. Dr. Cowell increased the journal’s IF steadily. The current 2-year IF is 1.694, more than doubling in 10 years. In 2019, JOSN ranked 37th among the 121 nursing journals indexed by ISI Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics, 2020). Authors want their research to be read and cited, and as a result, the number and quality of submissions in JOSN has increased substantially, accelerating the science and evidence for school nursing practice.
Recently, Dr. Cowell reflected on her school nursing career:
It has been an enormous honor to serve as Editor of the Journal of School Nursing. My entire career has been based in schools. As a new graduate in Cincinnati, Ohio, we were based in schools as public health nurses to do district nursing. My masters, PhD, and subsequent research has all been with school children and based in schools .... I managed school-based health centers at Crane and Orr high schools. As editor, I have had the privilege to work with new authors and experienced ones .... As a long time faculty member and researcher in school health and school nursing, people often ask me, “were you ever a ‘real’ nurse?” My answer always is, “I am still a school nurse.”
The new year brings another radical change to JOSN. When Dr. Cowell started as JOSN’s Executive Editor in 2009, electronic access of the journal’s articles had only been available for 8 years. We are so accustomed to immediate search and downloading of articles that we forget that it was not long ago that we rummaged through stacks of back issues to find the one article needed as evidence for practice change. Starting with the February 2021 issue, JOSN will only be available electronically. Many journals have already migrated to an all online platform. While for some, the change to an all online publication will be an easy transition, for others, it will be a challenge to change reading habits. It is imperative that school nurses access the science that drives quality practice for school-aged children. Members will be prompted to subscribe to the table of contents and online first email alerts (https://journals.sagepub.com/home/jsn#). Dr. Cowell’s practice of podcasts to accompany each issue will continue. Social media links to issues and individual articles will be expanded. And, I will be working with the Editorial Advisory Board and the Editorial Panel to explore methods to ensure that each and every school nurse continues to easily access the science as the basis for their practice in JOSN.
I invite you all to support the change in the journal’s editorship and the transition to the online format. I hope to hear from members, educators, researchers, and policy makers on strategies to promote the widespread adoption of science published in the journal to improve the health of school-aged children, their families, and their communities.
Martha Dewey Bergren, DNS, RN, NCSN, PHNA-BC,FNASN, FASHA, FAAN
Editor, The Journal of School Nursing
Cáceres, M. C., Guerrero-Martín, J., GonzálezMorales, B., Pérez-Civantos, D. V., Carreto-Lemus, M. A., & Durán-Gómez, N. (2017). Impact factor evolution of nursing research journals: 2009 to 2014. Nursing Outlook, 65(5), 562–571. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.outlook.2016.12.010
Clarivate Analytics. (n.d.). Journal impact factor. http://help.prodincites.com/inCites2Live/indicatorsGroup/aboutHandbook/usingCitationIndicatorsWisely/jif.html
Clarivate Analytics. (2020). Incites journal citation reports: Journals in nursing. https://jcr-clarivate-com.proxy.cc.uic.edu/JCRJournalHomeAction.action?pg=JRNLHOME&category Name=NURSING&categories=RZ
Ketefian, S., & Freda, M. C. (2009). Impact factors and citations counts: A state of disquiet. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 46, 751–752. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2008.08.009