Publishing Workshops: Number 1, Preparing Manuscripts

As members of the Editorial Board of Nursing Praxis in New Zealand, we are writing a series of articles on preparing manuscripts for submission to nursing journals.  Our purpose is to provide guidelines or frameworks to assist beginning authors.  The intention is not prescriptive; rather we are saying that understanding the most common formats and conventions, and some of the complexities and debates, is an important part of developing writing and publishing skills.  Although the focus of the series is on preparing manuscripts, we anticipate that the papers will prove equally valuable to nurses developing skills in reading and evaluating literature relevant to their practice.  This paper is the first in the set, providing an overview of the whole.  It contains brief discussions of several general issues surrounding the submission of papers for publication:  a) the most common types of articles published in journals, b) the different types of professional journals, and c) the process of submitting an