Guest Editorial: Moving Research Utilization into the Millennium

Abstract

What a wonderful opportunity: to be guest editor for the first issue of the next 30 years of the Canadian Journal of Nursing Research _ and setting the foundation for entering the new millennium! With all opportunities, however, come challenges. While dissemination and research utilization are everyday terms for many nurses, they are still primarily conceptual and lack operational detail for end-users in clinical practice, education, administration and management, and policy-making. It is only in the past 30 to 40 years that attention has been explicitly directed to explaining factors that affect coordination of research and decision-making in these contexts, and this primarily with respect to the medical profession. The nurse authors of the articles in this seminal issue of the Journal have helped our profession achieve greater theoretical understanding of dissemination and research utilization and have proposed frameworks and models to test these processes. They are leaders in expanding this focus in nursing and research.