Descriptor: The generation, synthesis, translation, application, and dissemination of nursing knowledge to improve health and transform health care (AACN, 2018).
Contextual Statement: Nursing scholarship informs science, enhances clinical practice, influences policy, and impacts best practices for educating nurses as clinicians, scholars, and leaders. Scholarship is inclusive of discovery, application, integration, and teaching. While not all inclusive, the scholarship of discovery includes primary empirical research, analysis of large data sets, theory development, and methodological studies. The scholarship of practice interprets, draws together, applies, and brings new insight to original research (Boyer, 1990; AACN 2018).
Knowledge of the basic principles of the research process, including the ability to critique research and determine its applicability to nursing’s body of knowledge, is critical. Ethical comportment in the conduct and dissemination of research and advocacy for human subjects are essential components of nursing’s role in the process of improving health and health care. Whereas the research process is the generation of new knowledge, evidence-based practice (EBP) is the process for the application, translation, and implementation of best evidence into clinical decision-making. While evidence may emerge from research, EBP extends beyond just data to include patient preferences and values as well as clinical expertise. Nurses, as innovators and leaders within the interprofessional team, use the uniqueness of nursing in nurse-patient relationships to provide optimal care and address health inequities, structural racism, and systemic inequity.