Perspectives: <i>The Journal of Research in Nursing</i>: constancy and change

research-article2024for more than one in five papers.While it is not shown on the graph, this has predominantly involved West Asian countries, notably Jordan and Iran.As such, JRN has become a major English language outlet for the thriving nursing research environments in this region.The proportion of North American and non-UK European authors have both shown a parabolic development, with both peaking in 2012-2015 and tapering off thereafter.While it is not shown on the graph, this is at least partially explained by the rise of papers authored by authors from different areas, reflecting the internationally collaborative approach many of the authors from these areas and from the United Kingdom tend to take.Another marked, and not entirely unexpected, development over the period has been the steady rise of the average number of authors per paper, almost doubling from 2.1 to 3.8 (Figure 2).This reflects the changing scientific environment, where increasing value has been put on teamwork in research and a corresponding decline in the single-authored research paper.While displaying less of a gradient, there has also been a steady rise in the proportion of first authors who are female (Figure 3), rising from a ratio of just under two in three authors when JRN commenced publishing to just under three in four authors now.While the proportion of male authors remains greater than the proportion of nursing registrants who are men in most countries, the trend is moving strongly towards parity.The proportion of first authors who are nurses has remained remarkably steady over the years, starting out at 76% and rising to 84%, then falling back to the most recent proportion of 78% (Figure 4).This reflects JRN's ethos of giving a powerful voice to nurses, while also providing them with an important informational resource by facilitating the dissemination of pertinent research by non-nursing health and organisational experts.Researchers from universities or equivalent educational or research institutions dominate the authorship of papers (Figure 5).Between just under 60% to just under 80% of papers were outputs produced by authors from these types of organisation.However, these headline figures, Figure 1.Percentage of authors by location.