LAUSR

In the previous SJCS, September 2017, the guest editorial of the chairperson for NCCS, Professor Margareta Asp looked for the future by challenging members of the scientific community to further develop caring sciences. The challenge for today according to professor Asp is to participate in the public debate and spread scientific knowledge of caring to society. Evidence-based practice is currently developed in nursing education by giving students’ tools for doing systematic literature reviews and critically assess the knowledge available. This is not enough, but in future, both new graduates and established researchers need to have courage to express their knowledge, and also publicly defend their views. Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences can be seen as an important tool firstly for the authors to practise scientific communication, although most of the readers belong to our own disciplines. For the readers, it delivers new evidence-based research. For example, the results in the article of Palese and colleagues indicated that the in-hospital medical patients’ degree of satisfaction with nursing care was higher in those wards, in which there were more bachelor-educated nurses and were teaching hospitals. This is an indication that both the nurses’ education level and the context of the hospital matters for the quality of care. The knowledge should be applied in the work of nursing leaders but also more widely to hospital management and policy makes. However, we should not forget that evidence in not all, but there is also tacit knowledge, which is important to be used and moved from experienced colleagues to young nurses and nursing students. Another important tool for public debate is conferences. We editors of SJCS participated in September 2017 in the seminar to celebrate 25th Anniversary of Caring Science education in Abo Akademi University, Vaasa, Finland. It indicated clearly that there are good discussions and collaboration in caring sciences in Scandinavia. The key note speakers and seminar participants represented several Scandinavian countries. We are looking forward next possibilities for scientific debate, when in June 3 to 5th, 2018, Nursing Science at University of Tampere is welcoming 5th Nordic conference in familyfocused nursing with the theme families throughout the life span. We are almost closing the year 2017 during the time when the world has experienced many difficult changes. But in our Scandinavian Journal, we are happy to tell you that we were able to increase the impact factor of the journal. This would not be possible without interesting topics which all the authors have discussed in their articles. And great thanks go also to our reviewers, without their important comments the manuscripts would not reach the high level of a publishable article. During the year, we have received about 350 manuscripts from all over the world. We have published about 80 articles. Because of big amount of manuscripts submitted, we have been able to choose the best of them for review and publication. In the beginning of a new year, we all have the possibility to make some wishes. Our editorial team is really wishing for a more fluent review process for the manuscripts. We do understand that authors are looking forward to hearing from the phase of their manuscripts and then be able to develop them according to the reviewer’s comments. We wish our authors, reviewers, readers and all the collaborators Season Greetings and a Happy New Year 2018. P€aivi Astedt-Kurki Professor, Editor-in-Chief Marja Kaunonen Professor, Associate Editor Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences