Assessing the Impact of Research Offices in Schools of Nursing

Creating a scholarly culture of inquiry is essential to the advancement of any discipline. Since nursing is first and foremost a practice discipline with the primary goal of improving the health and quality of care of individuals and populations it serves, our programs of research must share and reflect that goal. To achieve this goal, nurse scientists must not only secure external funding to support their scholarly research endeavors but also ensure that their findings are widely disseminated to inform interventions and policies to improve the delivery of healthcare and public health. Therefore, it is a school of nursing’s responsibility to provide the resources and infrastructure its faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and predoctoral students need to successfully pursue research funding, conduct research studies, and disseminate their findings. One common approach to foster the research enterprise and enhance productivity within schools of nursing is to establish a research program or office dedicated to providing scientific and administrative support. Because the required resources, including administrator time and effort, are often limited and costly, it is vital to examine whether the return on these investments is paying off. While extant literature indicates the need for infrastructure to promote research capacity in schools of nursing and provides recommendations for services, the most recent articles were published more than five years ago. In addition, we could find no scholarly, peer-reviewed articles that assessed and reported data on the impact of dedicated research offices. Hence, the aims of this presentation are to (1) describe the development, components, and services of a research office which supports scholarly and research endeavors in a school of nursing and (2) recommend strategies to evaluate the impact and outcomes of these activities.

Essential services and initiatives of an established nursing research office, as well as data regarding their impact, will be presented. Topics include: overcoming challenges to sharing facilities and administrative cost recovery across schools to promote interdisciplinary research (XXX et al., 2011); creating and updating a research mission, vision, and strategic plan (XXX et al., 2013); launching a global research program (XXX et al., 2014); providing assistance for grant preparation, research, and dissemination (e.g., statistical, library, and research software support); measuring the time and costs of submitting federal grant applications (XXX et al., 2015); implementing and assessing outcomes of manuscript and grant writing workshops (XXX & XXX, 2016); quantifying the impact of intramural pilot funding and internal grant review mechanisms (XXX & XXX, 2018); and exploring innovative methods to measure research productivity across schools.

An example of initiatives to be discussed includes outcome data evaluating an intramural pilot grant opportunity and an internal grant review program. Fourteen pilot grants awarded over a five-year period resulted in 16 peer-reviewed articles, 33 presentations, and 11 externally-funded grants. For grant applications that underwent any type of internal review, 41.7% (20/48) received funded compared with 20% (8/40) that did not participate, p = 0.03 (XXX & XXX, 2018). Based on these findings, we strongly encourage implementing intramural pilot grant opportunities and internal grant review sessions. Additional recommendations will be provided for research offices in schools of nursing seeking to evaluate the outcomes of their services and initiatives and assess the value added by their resources and infrastructure.