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15 years, 15 achievements

Manuel Amezcua
Director de la revista Index de Enfermería

Index de Enfermería [Index Enferm] 2006; 52-53: 9-10 (original version in Spanish, printed issue)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Amezcua M. 15 years, 15 achievements. Index de Enfermería [Index Enferm] (digital version) 2006 52-53. In </index-enfermeria/52-53/e0910.php> Consulted

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     The year 2006 means for Index an opportunity for a double celebration: the 18th anniversary as a unique project oriented towards the management of nursing knowledge and the regular publication without a break along 15 years of the Journal Index de Enfermería. This would be probably one of those moments so eagerly awaited by an organization for celebrating with a great fanfare its own existence, and a chance to convince the world that there is a before and after since it was born. We will not do such a thing, or better, we will celebrate it in the best way we know, that is, working daily, being faithful to the commitments we have built throughout all these years with the community that benefits from Index's services.
     We are not used to melancholic glances or triumphalism, but neither we will deny that, when moments like the current one arrive, the reflection on the meaning of what is being done is unavoidable. Not long ago, and regarding the nursing knowledge and its relation with the marketing of science, questions like the following arose: can (nursing knowledge) make its way through the boom of discoveries that take place daily in the health context? Are there proper ways of expression and socialization that can make it recognisable? Is it possible to determine its impact on the scientific community? Is it possible to make a non-discrediting assessment? Now that we think our journal has come of age, we are convinced that the answer is YES, there is more than enough evidence that legitimises the nursing knowledge and also the nursing knowledge of Latin American cultural space, although some international organizations could not or did not want to become aware of the fact. Some of these evidences are directly linked to the strategies the Fundación Index has been developing in order to universalize the scientific knowledge on cares. Let us see some of them:

     1. CUIDEN has made it possible to visualize the scientific heritage of women nurses and, at the same time has operated a change in the information consumption patterns for Latin American women nurses, that have gone, from mentioning themselves in their own local space, to become knowledge consumers, regardless the place knowledge may occur.
     2. The library LASCASAS is succeeding in the consolidation as the first space for knowledge exchange on health cares in Latin America, avoiding the use of mercantilist criteria.
     3. The periodicals archive CANTARIDA has made available the first Latin America collection of full-text journals. It is not as outstanding for its size as for the singularity of the subjects it covers.
     4. EL FONDO DE LA HISTORIA DEL CUIDADO (The History of Care's Fund) discovers the importance of knowledge as the cultural heritage of nursery.
     5. The ESCUELA DE INVESTIGADORES (School of Researchers) has developed an effective method for the training of researchers that highlights the results (during its first year, the program Quid-Innova has multiplied by ten the production capacity of its students).
     6. The Laboratorio de Investigación Cualitativa (LIC, Laboratory for Qualitative Research) has achieved the socialization in the context of health of remarkable formats of scientific expression such as biographical accounts or clinical narrative.
     7. The publication of the collection ARCHIVOS DE LA MEMORIA (Files of Memory) has been the result of the acceptance of the phenomenological approach as a strategy for the development of a humanistic nature research.
     8. La Red de Historia y Pensamiento Enfermero (RIHPE, Net of Nursing History and Thought) and the journal Temperamentvm consolidate a model for the approach to the nursing humanities sustained in the cooperation principles.
     9. INDEX SOLIDARIDAD shows that the scientific knowledge on health care in the cooperation with disadvantaged peoples produces sustainable development.
     10. The Observatorio de Enfermería Basada en la Evidencia (OEBE, Nursery Observatory Based on Evidence) has managed to reformulate the movement of scientific evidence applied to nursery and has turned it into a reflexive and critical movement on the potentiality that research has to transform clinical practice from the nurse's point of view.
     11. The journal EVIDENTIA, in its task of helping clinical nurses in the process of decision-making on patient care, gives prevalence to the usefulness of research results in front of the traditional systems of organizing knowledge into a hierarchy.
     12 the Journal INDEX DE ENFERMERIA has gone from eclecticism to persuasion, becoming the nursing journal that has made a greater impact in Latin America and the third biomedical journal with greatest impact in Spain (IHCD-CSIC).
     13. Journal index CUIDEN CITACIÓN is succeeding for evaluators of scientific activity to recognize the peculiarities of nursing knowledge and so to consider contributions of Latin American nurses to their right extent.
     14. The Consejo Iberoamericano de Editores de Revistas de Enfermería (CIBERE, Latin American Council of Publishers of Nursing Journals) has been a consequence of changing relations based on competitiveness into a culture of scientific cooperation that places efficiency, universalization and accessibility in front of individual interests.
     15. INDEX IN ENGLISH, the first publication in English language of an nursing journal written in Spanish shows that relations can be established with a more developed world, overcoming dependence and favouring an exchange of knowledge, so alternating the relationships consumer-producer.

     We could continue giving a list of some other milestones that would contribute to shape in greater detail the continuum of INDEX project, but these are enough to show the Index model of action starting from the visualization strategies of scientific production (1-5) in order to continue with concrete actions of diversification of the ways of generating knowledge (6-9) before proposing alternatives to the organization of knowledge into a hierarchy (10-11) and finally developing instruments to facilitate an adequate assessment (12-15).
     Obviously, we do not regard these achievements as facts that will guarantee our remaining for posterity as heroes of a new nursery, among other things, because we have to face daily intransigent people who remind us that everything we do is imperfect, inopportune, inconsistent and even illegal. We thank them for the encouragement their criticisms trigger on us, but to be truthful, it would be more adequate to thank so many other people and institutions that have devoted themselves to Index and have made possible our arrival to this point with the aim of going on working.
     Although we have taken giant steps, there is still a lot to be done until the definitive normalization of the situation of nursing knowledge in a scientific area where medical science takes up a hegemonic position frequently exclusive towards other kinds of knowledge comprised within health sciences, including also popular knowledge, -a situation that is aggravated by the exclusive influence of some scientific-cultural spaces on others. What we intend to do in Index is governmental authorities to legalize nursing knowledge. What we intend is to make nursing knowledge competitive from the point of view of the accessibility to scientific resources without being forced to flee to other contexts alien to nursery or the specific individuals that give it sense. In other words, the normalization of scientific knowledge will be only achieved in the moment that a research woman nurse will observe that the product (article) she has produced within its clinical context and has disseminated in the journal of her speciality with the aim of being used -mainly by other clinical woman nurses that have to face the same problems as herself in its cultural context- will have the same value for knowledge-assessment purposes regardless this nurse comes from New York or from Cordoba.
     When the nurse from Cordoba prefers publishing in a New Yorker journal her achievements on the effectiveness of an intervention in support to family woman carers advanced in years, despite the scarce or nil circulation of the journal in Spain, it implies that the system of assessment of nursing knowledge the Spanish authorities use is defective or unrewarding for herself in favour of others'. This situation highlights an almost chronic problem, because in Spain, as it happens in other countries whose level of scientific development is still to be improved, there is not only a brain drain (researchers), but also a knowledge drain; so knowledge has to change language and country to make itself recognisable in its own one.
     In the closest future that we are able to discern now, we are convinced that Index de Enfermeria will play a relevant role as an emblematic journal with a great capacity of adaptation to emerging research trends, we will go on experimenting and suggesting new modes of scientific communication and we hope our journal will delve deeper into the publishing market beyond the disciplinary limits of nursery. However, we also dare to foretell the direction that knowledge management strategies will take, where the new information technologies will play an indispensable role: we predict our arrival to the era of digital journals, in the normalization of which we will have to invest our efforts, commitment and resources; we will be witnesses of the development of areas of shared knowledge, with digital periodical archives, publishing procedures based on cooperation, etc; we have gone from the impactolatry to the advanced bibliographic information, where researchers will be able to consult the movement of their publications in amicable environments in the maintenance of which they can participate; in short, we will witness the loss of hegemony of certain scientific contexts in favour of a new science based on diversity, where equal opportunities might supply knowledge with true effectiveness; knowledge will be more democratic and useful to society, and so will be nursing knowledge.
     However, and thinking twice about it, we don't know really if we are foretelling the future or shaping a new utopia. Time will tell.

 

 

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