3 Barriers to Scholarly Dissemination

In my editorial for the May/June issue of JAPNA, I highlighted the 3 primary barriers I see when working with writers who are stuck. Similar to our work as nurses and healthcare providers, it is important to identify the cause of a problem before we can effectively resolve it. Writer’s block can often be traced back to one of the following causes…

Feeling Uncertain

Quite often, academic professionals and clinicians feel pressured to publish. This can be associated with rank and promotion or competition for funding and awards. This results in having the motivation to write, but no clear direction or purpose. In cases like this, suggestions to dedicate time daily to writing can be unproductive and frustrating. 

Feeling Overwhelmed

Alternatively, nursing and health science writers can be brimming with ideas for multiple projects or even directions to go within a single project, struggling to narrow the focus to something manageable. It can be challenging to respond to the direction to simply “narrow the focus” without guidance support. 

Feeling Incapacitated by Perfectionism 

Perfectionism can plague novice and experienced writers equally. It’s defined as “a tendency to demand…an extremely high or even flawless level of performance, in excess of what is required of the situation.” With this impossible standard, writers can feel trapped in an endless loop of review, editing, or worst-case scenario, scrapping the manuscript and starting from scratch, without any indication that the edits are actually improving it. For this reason, many potentially impactful projects or studies are not available for the benefit of our professional communities.  

If these barriers resonate and you’d like some ideas for how to work past them, check out my editorial for more information on how to move forward.