To those who have been published

I'm sure you've already read through the author guidelines at American Nurse Today

What I find strange is that while they are a peer-reviewed publication, they actually limit your reference citations to 5 or 10 as a maximum (depending on publication purpose/availability mode). Straight from their web page offered above:

Please limit references to no more than five (10 for a CE article). You may provide an additional 5 references (10 for a CE article) to place with the online version of the article.

That is very unusual to me; I've never encountered such a strict limitation in well-respected journals. That actually makes your job more difficult, as you'll have less published expertise to lean on as support for your observations (I still can't get over that limitation )

While on the topic of references, I'm sure you know this already but would bear repeating for others considering publishing... go beyond the abstract. Pull the actual publication and read it. I have found more erroneous interpretation of results in the last decade that slip by and are published, although the abstract paints a glorious picture otherwise. Kinda scary.

Good luck to you, and thank you for contributing to the knowledge base!

Do your best at the writing, and then the editorial staff will help clean it up. You should get a copy to proof before publication to make sure that the editorial process didn't distort or completely miscommunicate what you meant to say. Likewise if they are going to make a summary or abstract, be sure you have the right to approve it before it appears anywhere.

The ANA is generally pretty sound on publishing. :) However, their immediate past AJN editor, Diana Mason, wrote a wonderful editorial a few years back in which, among other things, she decried the 5-year limit on references, saying that this caused error in two ways-- one, more recent citations of old material often got it wrong and thus perpetuated error, and two, an artificial limit like this automatically excludes classic papers of the past of which everyone should be aware. (The reference on this editorial is: Consider the Source: Nursing’s journalism is not what it ought to be. Diana J. Mason PhD RN FAAN, Editor emerita, American Journal of Nursing. American Journal of Nursing/Wolters Kluwer Health. April 2009 Vol 109, no. 4-- let me know if you want a copy). You probably won't have a lot of references anyway, but if you do find and want to cite a perfect classic, let them know about Diana's views on this. :).

Have fun! it's a thrill seeing your (real) name in print.