NuRsing Research in the 21st Century: R You Ready?

Abstract

Nurse scientists are adept at translating findings from basic science into useful clinical- and community-based interventions to improve health. Over time, the focus of some nursing research has grown to include the assessment and evaluation of genomic and other output from high-throughput, or “omic,” technologies as indicators related to health and disease. To date, the growth in the application of omics technologies in nursing research has included calls to increase attention to omics in nursing school curricula and educational training opportunities, such as the Summer Genetics Institute offered by the National Institute of Nursing Research. However, there has been scant attention paid in the nursing literature to the complexity of data analysis or issues of reproducibility related to omics studies. The goals of this article are to (1) familiarize nurse scientists with tools that encourage reproducibility in omics studies, with a focus on the free and open-source data processing and analysis pipeline, and (2) provide a baseline understanding of how these tools can be used to improve collaboration and cohesion among interdisciplinary research team members. Knowledge of these tools and skill in applying them will be important for communication across disciplines and imperative for the advancement of omics research in nursing.