Abstract
An increase in capacity and the improvement of quality remain the paramount tasks for the nursing research endeavour. Recent attempts have been made to scope the shape of nursing research and to track any movement in these respects, over time. This paper will briefly report on the construction of a national database and the development of a methodological model to illustrate selected features of the contemporary circumstance of nursing research in the United Kingdom. The present study, funded by the National Health Executive (West Midlands), made scholarly use of the content of 1,084 abstracts submitted to three consecutive Royal College of Nursing Annual International Research Conferences, to create a database capable of being interrogated for a variety of purposes. These data were linked to a Geographical Information System and outputs from the analyses were mapped against a background of 1999 National Health Service Regional boundaries. Substantive findings have the potential to help uncover their relationship with other policy agendas and with priority areas for investigation. The present study has built the infrastructure to establish a unique UK nursing research data archive and further interrogation of the database could help to frame second-generation studies, using appropriately different approaches.
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