The Most Popular Journals - Essay Example

I can name various journals as my favorite among the nursing profession journals. I consider the journals my favorite based on my analysis and evaluation of those journals. I found out that they contain sufficient information that can be needed by a practicing nurse or a nursing student. According to Haustein (2012), to identify the suitability of a journal to a profession one should take into consideration the various characteristics of that journal. In this paper, I use the characteristics of my five favorite journals to determine how suitable and relevant they are to my nursing profession.

My five favorite journals are The Australian nursing journal, Nephrology nursing journal, Association of operating room nurses AORN journal, American journal of public health, and British medical journal (International edition). All these journals contain information derived from the most current research. They all have several articles that cover a variety of topics. The different publisher has published the journals so in my selection, I was not publisher biased. Moreover, they have different editors, which compares with their varying content.

Most of these journals have nursing professions as their target audience. However, there are those whose target audience is the medical profession in general. As clearly understood, the nursing profession is a medical profession and hence if a journal has medical profession as its target audience then it targets the nurses. According to Oermann & Hays (2010), the target audience of a journal can show whether the journal is relevant to a certain profession. Thus using this concept, I can say with confidence that these journals are very important in my training as a nursing student and in my profession as a practicing nurse.

Another thing that shows the relevance in these journals as far as the nursing profession is concerned is the type of articles they contain. Most of them contain knowledge about evidence-based nursing practices and findings of various research undertaken in the medical care field. The nursing profession requires knowledge of evidence-based practice and a lot of research for one to be proficient (Webb, 2011). Since all these journals provide this knowledge, they would be very relevant to my profession as a practicing nurse.

The Relevance of My Journals To My Future Job

 I have read several articles in this journal and the knowledge I obtain from them has been very substantial in my training as a nurse. From these journals, I managed to obtain knowledge on the most recent research undertaken on the health care field one of them being research taken on Transitioning from peritoneal dialysis to renal transplant that found in the Nephrology nursing journal. From my reading of the journal, I have also come across various articles with very good information and health care. Since the nursing profession is based, on health care, such articles will be very relevant to this profession and thus I expect them to be very important to me as a nurse.

According to Webb (2011), the role that research plays in the nursing profession cannot be under-estimated. It is known that for a person to be proficient in this profession he should be undertaking research as frequently as possible. These journals contain information about the most recent research undertaken by other nursing and medical profession as well as health care practice information. This can be very important to a nursing profession in its process of undertaking research. Since it will be my objective to become as much proficient as possible in nursing, I will be undertaking frequent research and hence these journals will be very relevant to my profession.

The Journal I Would Choose and Why

All these journals will be very relevant to my profession as a practicing nurse due to the content of the articles they contain. However, the degree of relevance to my profession differs from one journal to the other. This is indicated by having some of them target a general nursing profession while others are more specific. Due to this as a medical professional, I would choose to read the Nephrology nursing journal. This is because of my interest in specializing in nephrology nursing later in my profession.

From looking at the topics in some of the articles in the Nephrology nursing journal, it is clear that this journal must be containing a lot of information that is not only important to the nephrology nurses but also to the other nurses. Moreover, I have read about two articles from this journal and found them very informative. Furthermore, most of its articles are found on the internet at no cost and thus they are accessible. According to Oermann & Gaberson, (2009), for a journal to be good to a student taking a clinical course it should reflect the practice, event, and activities undertaken by professionals in his area of specialization. I have found that the journal achieves these objectives and thus it is a very good one for me as a nursing student.