Describing precisely what nurses do

Numerous important papers written by nurses and other scientists to improve nursing practice are not read by many nurses because two of the common ways authors use to describe what nurses do obscures the applicability of studies to nurses in general. Interventions (aka, procedures, skills, tasks) used and populations studied, including diseases, are less robust indicators of research results than are tests of nursing theory. Further, some of these important papers are not stored in or retrieved by accessing the Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature database. We believe many research papers by nurses and those who study nursing would benefit from an explicit rather than implicit test of nursing theory and we advise authors use Henderson's theoretical textbook because of its link to research and expert opinion professional literature. Significant papers should be reversely cited in her textbook to place them in the context of the knowledge of nursing she recorded for much of the 20th century.