Perspectives on Policy and the Value of Nursing Science in a Big Data Era

Abstract

As data volume explodes, nurse scientists grapple with ways to adapt to the big data movement without jeopardizing its epistemic values and theoretical focus that celebrate while acknowledging the authority and unity of its body of knowledge. In this article, the authors describe big data and emphasize ways that nursing science brings value to its study. Collective nursing voices that call for more nursing engagement in the big data era are answered with ways to adapt and integrate theoretical and domain expertise from nursing into data science.

Nursing research priorities based on CINAHL database: A scoping review

“…It is important to increase the visibility of big data conducted by nurse scientists (Westra et al, ). Gephart, Davis, and Shea () stated that to stay contemporary, nurse scientists need to build from both theory and big data in ways that make nursing knowledge more accessible and visible. Overall, nursing researchers should systematically use large health registers of data as well as big data in nursing research.…”

Predicted Influences of Artificial Intelligence on Nursing Education: Scoping Review

“…In the last 5 years, multiple expository papers and research studies have explored the current and predicted influences of AIHTs on nurse educators, nursing students, and practicing nurses [5][6][7][8]. Given the prediction that new technological advances are expected to transform aspects of nursing and its education [9,10], nurse educators need to increase their knowledge and comfort levels with both the concept and realities to be brought by emerging AIHTs.…”

“…One article encouraged the use of predictive analytics by nurse educators to enhance students' clinical judgment and decision-making skills as they explore the executed decision path provided by the AIHT [40]. Finally, some articles simply presented a broad discussion of AIHTs and their potential influences on nursing education with no mention of specific examples [5,6,[8][9][10]13,29,[48][49][50][51].…”

Nursing Science, Nursing Theory: Nurse Atheists, Nurse Agnostics, Nurse Theists

“…If so, these nurse atheists and nurse agnostics are involved in a retrograde process that takes nursing science and its theories to earlier years of their development. However, there is a glimmer of hope, as indicated in the article on big data by Gephart, Davis, and Shea (2018), who can be nurse theists since they advocate a nursing theory perspective throughout the article. Reed (2018) emphasized that the authors acknowledged the need to sustain a nursing perspective as big data take shape in nursing.…”