In January, while still feeling ambitious, I started a challenge to other nurses to read a research article per week for the year. The point was to push myself to read more research, however in graduate school this is not always a challenge, but I wanted to share what I was reading and push others to read more as well.

To day I have not been doing so well. I have been reading a lot of research, but I have not been good at writing a summary and sharing what I learned. This may sound like a failure, but because I was using social media to start the challenge it turns out it hasn't been. This is because some other amazing nurses took up the challenge and actually have been doing this [See Nursing and the World, Toronto Emerg, Nurse Story, Nursetopia].

This is just one example of how social media can build and develop professionalism. Now that I'm starting to reflect on the project, I really like what others have added to the challenge. For example other have used good headings to make their posts easy to read. I took and adapted @JoniWaton's and now I'm using it for when I read an article in Mendeley - hopefully using these criteria will help make it easier to post updates online too. Here are the ones I plan to use:

The Article: 
Big Idea:
Evidence:
Quotable:
So What?

This is a screenshot of how I read my articles incase anyone wondered. I like reading digital. I lose paper copies of articles and the notes with them. If anyone has a great system or just one that works well for them I'd love to hear about it! Always trying to find better systems for reading and organize my research.

Back to why I originally started this post. Time is scarce and no one person can do everything. That is the beauty of what technology can do, allow other to contribute and collaborate. In that end, I never wanted the Nursing Research Challenge to be a me or Nursing Ideas thing. I just wanted other nurses to read more research and to share the great articles we come across. After a brief email conversation about that with Joni Watson we've decided it could be expanded and built upon in the future, and we already have some ideas. However, that does not mean that we own it we'd like you ideas and if you want your participation would be welcome too. Feel free to get in touch or leave a comment if you are interested, and here is to celebrating the advancement of the profession.