Research development in a university nursing school in Southern Ireland

Are researcher development interventions, alone or in any combination, effective in improving researcher behavior? A systematic review

Academic institutions funded by the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) Program of the National Institutes of Health were challenged recently by the Institute of Medicine to expand traditional mentoring of graduate and postdoctoral scholars to include training and continuing education for faculty, professional staff, and community partners. A systematic review was conducted to determine whether researcher development interventions, alone or in any combination, are effective in improving researcher behavior. PubMed, CINAHL, and Education Research Complete databases and select journals were searched for relevant articles published from January 2000 through October 2012. A total of 3,459 papers were identified, and 114 papers were retrieved for in-depth analysis. None included randomization. Twenty-two papers reported subjects with professional degrees, interventions, and outcomes. Interventions were meetings, outreach visits, colleague mediation, audit and feedback, and multifaceted interventions. Most studies reported multifaceted interventions (68.2%), often involving mentored learning experiences, and meetings. All studies reported a change in performance, including numbers of publications or grant applications. Nine studies reported changes in competence, including writing, presentation, or analytic skills, and performance in research practice (40.9%). Even as, the quality of evidence was weak to establish causal linkages between researcher development and improved researcher behavior, nearly all the projects (81.8%) received funding from governmental agencies, professional societies, or other organizations. Those who design researcher development activities and those who evaluate the programs are challenged to develop tools and conduct studies that measure the effectiveness, costs, and sustainability of researcher development in the CTSA Program.

After the doctorate: a qualitative study investigating nursing research career development in Jordan

There is a dearth of research exploring the development of postdoctoral nursing research careers in non-Western contexts. This paper reports on a qualitative study of Jordanian graduates of UK PhD programs. Interviews were held with 16 graduates who worked in the nursing faculty of seven different universities in Jordan. Participants reported that their doctoral degree had equipped them with confidence and enthusiasm for developing a research career. Mentorship, leadership, and peer support were identified as essential to supporting ongoing research activity. Access to these sources of support was variable and participants also described a range of institutional and organizational structures that directly or indirectly discouraged them from developing research productivity. This research suggests that support for postdoctoral novice researchers is an important area for further attention - for Jordanian universities, for UK PhD supervisors (and their associated academic departments), and for the wider nursing community.

An adaptive approach to facilitating research productivity in a primary care clinical department

Efforts to foster the growth of a department's or school's research mission can be informed by known correlates of research productivity, but the specific strategies to be adopted will be highly context-dependent, influenced by local, national, and discipline-specific needs and resources. The authors describe a multifaceted approach-informed by a working model of organizational research productivity-by which the University of Minnesota Department of Family Medicine and Community Health (Twin Cities campus) successfully increased its collective research productivity during a 10-year period (1997-2007) and maintained these increases over time.Facing barriers to recruitment of faculty investigators, the department focused instead on nurturing high-potential investigators among their current faculty via a new, centrally coordinated research program, with provision of training, protected time, technical resources, mentoring, and a scholarly culture to support faculty research productivity. Success of these initiatives is documented by the following: substantial increases in the department's external research funding, rise to a sustained top-five ranking based on National Institutes of Health funding to U.S. family medicine departments, later-stage growth in the faculty's publishing record, increased research capacity among the faculty, and a definitive maturation of the department's research mission. The authors offer their perspectives on three apparent drivers of success with broad applicability-namely, effective leadership, systemic culture change, and the self-awareness to adapt to changes in the local, institutional, and national research environment.