Author: Karen Holland
Publication: Nurse Education in Practice

As Editor I am continually faced with decisions concerning the issue of whether a paper submitted to the journal has merit or value to the wider international nursing and midwifery community if it reports itself as an evaluation study of a small-scale development in the UK or elsewhere and if it is of value to developing the evidence-base of nursing and healthcare education? These decisions, and others, usually have to be made prior to providing feedback to authors as a result of either preliminary reading and review by the editor, or feedback from the reviewers about a paper’s quality and potential to ’make a difference’ to other’s practice as educators and/or add to the body of knowledge on the topic. The reviewers consider this using a set of criteria with which to make a judgement (for all submissions including specific criteria for reported research studies), which provides me the editor with a degree of confidence that all papers are being assessed using the same baseline criteria. Of course, much like student feedback, each individual reviewer offers additional commentary to assist the author to develop their paper if revision is required, which to me is an invaluable contribution on their part to the scholarship of both author and the wider scholarly community.