LAUSR

Doctorally prepared nurse scientists play an essential role in creating disciplinary nursing knowledge, developing innovative and patient-centred interventions, and translating nursing knowledge into practice to improve the standards of nursing care (Broome & Fairman, 2018; Younas & Porr, 2019). Concerns have been raised that existing experienced nurse scientists are at the age of retirement, and there is global shortage of nurses in doctoral programmes (Buerhaus, Skinner, Auerbach, & Staiger, 2017; McSweeney, Weglicki, & García, 2018). There have been calls to action to promote the entry of nurses into doctoral programmes (Broome & Fairman, 2018; McSweeney et al., 2018). However, nurses noted barriers such as time, money, work–life balance, family commitments and lack of motivation to pursue doctoral education (Cavanagh & Alshehry, 2016; Gorczyca, 2013; Squires, Kovner, Faridaben, & Chyun, 2014). Amongst these barriers, one of the common barriers is limited knowledge about the application process, limited confidence in preparing a high-quality graduate application and fear of rejection (Gorczyca, 2013). We aim to highlight six factors that may negatively affect nurses' confidence to prepare excellent doctoral applications and lead to rejection.