MCF Leadership Presentation: All I Really Need to Know I Learned From…Another Nurse – Jacqueline Owens, PhD, RN, CNE

INANE Conference: Wednesday AM 8/6/25

Speaker: Jacqueline Owens, PhD, RN, CNE – MCF Leadership Award Winner, 2025

Description: INANE recognized Dr. Jacqueline Owens, as the 2025 Recipient of the Margaret Comerford Freda Award to Editorial Leadership in Nursing Publication. Julia Snethen, chair of the MCF Award Committee, presented the award, after which Dr. Owens gave her Leadership Address, “All I Really Need to Know I Learned…From Another Nurse.”

Summary of Leadership Address:

• When preparing for this talk, she thought about how she met Dr. Margaret Comerford Freda, Editor Emeritus of MCN, at our last INANE meeting in Maine in 2014
• She wanted to look back at Margaret’s work. Two things struck her:
  • Her passion for mentoring, encouraging authors, and using the editing process as a teaching opportunity, and her being a big proponent of “paying it forward.”
  • Her vision of nurse editors as “gatekeepers” of the literature
• The first nurse she learned from was Sue Barton, the fictional nurse from the book series. It’s not what nursing looks like today, but it was motivating to her as a child. Because of these books, she knew she wanted to be a nurse when I was 10. She really advocated for her patients. 
• Another nurse she learned from was her grandmother, who was an LPN and encouraged her to be a “professional nurse”, a registered nurse! Her grandmother was very active in her professional organization, which inspired her as well.
• Dr. Owens showed many pictures of nurses who had inspired and mentored her.

Dr. Owens discussed a review of the literature she recently completed on journal articles that strive to impact the quality of nursing literature. (Did not include writing guidelines, textbooks, editorials, LTEs, NAE & Writer’s Camp, or oral presentations.)

Discussion of Findings:

• Publishing Opportunities
  • Where are nurses publishing? What kind of publishing opportunities are open to nurses?
• Editor Roles & Practices
  • International surveys of these roles/practices, ethical issues faced by nursing editors (NEs), NEs views on peer reviews, NEs compensations.
• Peer Review
  • NEs views on peer review, blinding in peer review, experience/time investment/motivators of nursing peer reviewers, peer reviewer training and editor support, ethical concerns of nursing reviewers.
  • Some of these were international surveys.
• References
  • Accuracy of nursing references, quotation and reference accuracy, practical effects of errors in reference lists, risk factors for citation errors in peer-reviewed nursing journals, citation analysis, dissemination of research in clinical nursing journals, and web citations.
• Predatory Journals
  • Study of open access predatory journals, characteristics of e-mail solicitations, quality of articles published in them, citations of articles in predatory nursing journals, comparative study of plagiarism in predatory publications, analysis of citation patterns and impact of predatory sources, integrity of databases for literature searches, best practices to avoid predatory journals, scoping review
• Novice/Student Work
  • What types of student papers are being submitted to journals, reporting on quality improvement projects, examination of rigor and value of final scholarly projects completed by DNP nursing students, and quality of DNP projects
• Quality of Articles
  • Bibliometric analysis of articles that represent excellence, analysis of citations in excellent publications, quality of articles published in predatory journals, research in nursing education and the IRB, examination of retracted articles in nursing literature, adherence to PRISMA 2020 reporting guidelines, and scope of systematic reviews published in nursing, completeness of systematic reviews based on PRISMA in nursing literature
• Evaluation of Journals
  • Dissemination of research in clinical nursing journals, information sources for developing the nursing literature, and a decline in theory-based studies
• Author Guidelines/Guidance
  • Guidance on citing/formatting references, quality of author guidelines in nursing journals, and developing a framework for currency and number of references
• Emerging Technology
  • Bibliometric impact analysis, bibliometric analysis of review types, bibliometric analysis of articles that represent excellence in nursing publication, assessing scholarly impact, prevalence of words/phrases associated with LLM generated text in nursing literature, generative AI detectors and accuracy.
• Miscellaneous
  • Effectiveness of an intervention for disseminating Cochrane reviews to nurses

Discussion Slides:

Conclusion: YES! Nursing editors ARE powerful gatekeepers for the nursing literature!

Your INANE 2025 reporter is Melissa Anne DuBois, BSN, RNC-OB, PhD Student.

Content for this post was obtained from the INANE 2025 website, the conference guidebook, internet searches, speaker submitted bios, and live reporting from each session. Any errors in content are purely accidental and not intended to offend. If you notice an error you would like corrected, please contact Melissa Anne at melissadubois2 at gmail dot com and she will be happy to make corrections.