Current Trends in Nursing Research Across Five Locations: The United States, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and Hong Kong

Purpose: Despite the importance of research in the discipline of nursing, current trends in nursing research have rarely been discussed across countries. The purpose of this article was to identify current trends in nursing research across five countries, including the United States, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and Hong Kong, in order to provide directions for future global nursing research.

Organizing construct: A discussion article.

Methods: To identify the current trends, seven leaders from the five countries had discussions through a series of workshops and conference presentations. After the most recent conference, all the leaders reflected for a month on their presentations and compiled the exemplars and cases from their experience and the existing literature in individual countries into a table. The tables and supporting references were collected at the completion of the reflection period. Then, the PowerPoint (Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA, USA) slideshows of the conference presentations by the leaders and the collected tables were analyzed using a content analysis.

Findings: Six themes reflecting the current trends in nursing research were extracted: (a) demographic alterations; (b) increasing diversities and globalization; (c) technology innovation; (d) individualized or personal care and population health initiatives; (e) health policies and regulations; and (f) nursing workforce changes.

Conclusions: Future directions for nursing research across the countries were proposed: (a) cost-effectiveness research; (b) implementation science; (c) data science; (d) training of the future generation of nurse researchers; (e) population health; and (f) team science.

Clinical relevance: This topic could be applied to any clinical settings.