Faculty role in support of student scholarly dissemination

Abstract

Background: Academic universities across all countries hold faculty accountable to some degree for scholarship/dissemination, teaching, and research. In concert with these expectations, student-faculty scholarly collaborations present with challenges, barriers, opportunities, and benefits to and for both parties. Time requirements, student and faculty writing skills, communication of expectations, and ethical considerations for engagement and authorship are common themes noted in the literature.

Purpose: This paper’s perspective explores the intricacies of the nurse faculty role in support of undergraduate and graduate nursing student scholarly writing with an emphasis on dissemination in peer-reviewed journals.

Findings: Nursing literature addresses the need for scholarly writing and dissemination around the following areas: general writing needs and academic requirements, strategies to advance student or faculty writing competence, nursing program specific challenges, institutional support, faculty productivity focused articles, writing for publication specific articles and student-faculty collaboration articles.

Conclusions: Scholarship collaboration in the form of student-faculty partnerships can be a rewarding experience. Faculty benefit from forming solid and often lasting relationships, and students benefit from mentorship and satisfaction of seeing their academic work as contributing to the science of nursing. When these opportunities are acknowledged and planned out with clear role expectations and guidelines in place, faculty gain additional experience in manuscript development and students gain solid writing skills that come from practice.