European Academy of Nursing Science and the Swedish Society of Nursing Summer Conference 2017: The Future Direction of European Nursing and Nursing Research

Dramatic changes have occurred during my 40+ years of teaching research methods to nurses and nursing students, including important transformations within the profession, an explosive growth in published research by nurses, greater inter-professional collaboration, increased funding opportunities, and stunning methodologic and technologic advances. In this talk I will describe some of the major ways in which nursing research has evolved over the past 4 decades by tracing content revisions in my textbook Nursing Research: Generating and Assessing Evidence for Nursing Practice-now in its 10th edition and still the world's #1 textbook on research methods for nurses. The earliest editions of this book had no mention of such key concepts as evidence-based practice, mixedmethods research, complex interventions, and systematic reviews; now, entire chapters are devoted to these topics. Indeed, it was not until the 3rd edition of the book (1987) that qualitative research was given serious coverage, and now many chapters of the book describe methods for conducting high-quality qualitative inquiry. My presentation will focus especially on the key revisions I introduced in the 10th edition, which was published in 2016 (2017 copyright date). In particular, I will discuss a topic about which I have become passionate-the measurement and interpretation of clinical significance (distinct from statistical significance) in nursing studies. I will also describe revisions that I am planning to make in the 11th edition, which will be published in early 2020. In all editions published thus far, I have strived to provide guidance on how to do research with rigor and integrity-that is, how to "get it right" when answering a research question. In the 11th edition I plan to devote considerably more attention to what nurse researchers can do to "get it right" in asking their research questions. In this regard, I will provide an overview of strategies for improving the relevance and applicability of nursing research.