An editorial in the Journal of Research in Nursing last year (McMahon, 2011) summarized the contents of the edition which included original papers with a methodological focus. The editor drew on a classification that colleagues and I had first proposed in a 2001 analysis of published nursing research (Traynor et al., 2001, p. 655). Looking back on this classification briefly allows some reflections on the current state of published nursing research in the UK.The original piece had emerged from the Centre for Policy in Nursing Research, one of our aims being to examine the then current state of nursing research, or as we termed it, in order to be more inclusive, research of relevance to nursing. This was probably the first time that this had been done in any depth. To do this we collaborated with experts in bibliometrics from the Wellcome Trust in order to identify, within the broad field of published biomedical research, the characteristics of research published by nurses and ask whether these had changed over the time period that we were able to investigate.
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