Disciplinary Thinking for the Scholarship of Nursing Research

The author critiques the current American Association of Colleges of Nursing definition of nursing scholarship for its lack of emphasis on building discipline-specific knowledge. The author defines nursing scholarship as scholarly activities and formal investigations designed to generate, synthesize, translate, apply, and disseminate discipline-specific knowledge that advances nursing’s societal commitments and responsibilities in promoting human health, human betterment, and wellbecoming. Nursing scholarship guided by disciplinary thinking consists of scholarship that is (a) informed by nursing philosophy; (b) framed within nursing’s metaparadigm concepts; (c) situated within a nursing paradigm; (d) conceptualized within a nursing conceptual framework or nursing midrange theory; and (e) focused on, depending on one’s paradigmatic and theoretical perspective, developing and testing concepts in nursing classification systems.