Since late 2016 I have been the Social Media Editor for the International Journal of Mental Health Nursing (IJMHN). If you’re interested in how that started, see meta4RN.com/IJMHN. The years that have followed have resulted in heaps of Tweets, Facebook posts and LinkedIn updates. As a byproduct, I’ve been keeping a closer eye on the journal than I would have otherwise, and stumbled across the fact that 2022 marks the anniversary of three important milestones in the journal’s history:

✅ 30 years as a fully refereed journal (1992)
✅ 20 years as the International Journal of Mental Health Nursing (2002)
✅ 10 years on social media (2012)

That observation has been explored and elaborated-on via my first (and probably only) editorial. Please read and share the article far and wide:

McNamara, P. (2022), Happy anniversary IJMHN. International Journal of Mental Health Nursing. https://doi.org/10.1111/inm.13025

Tweet

Below are some abbreviated highlights and a video summary from the editorial.

What’s in a name?

1980 Journal of the Australian Congress of Mental Health Nurses
1990 Australian Journal of Mental Health Nursing
1994 Australian and New Zealand Journal of Mental Health Nursing
2002 International Journal of Mental Health Nursing

Editors

1980 Dennis Cowell
1982 Ron Dee
1986 Owen Sollis
1987 Linda Salomons
1988 Andrew King
1990 Michael Clinton
1999 Michael Hazelton
2004 Brenda Happell 
2015 Kim Usher

I have not attempted to discover the names of everyone who has served on the journal’s editorial board – there would many dozens (in the hundreds?) of people of who have contributed over the years. For what it’s worth, below is a May/June 2022 snapshot of the editorial board.

Beyond the Walled Gardens

It is sensible to promote the work of IJMHN authors/researchers beyond the walled gardens of mental health nursing and academia. Below are links to the journal’s first excursions from behind the paywalls and exclusion zones that prevent people seeing the work and research of mental health nurses, and out to ‘the village square’ that is social media:

Twitter 2012 bit.ly/IJMHNTwitter
Facebook 2013 bit.ly/IJMHNfacebook
LinkedIn 2021 bit.ly/IJMHNLinkedIn

As I’ve argued previously (here and here), there’s not much value in spending weeks/months/years doing research, then pushing through the tedium of academic writing, and finally jumping through the flaming hoops of peer review only for your work to sit around unread and gathering dust. Authors and the institutions that support them should promote the paper to its greatest readership. The IJMHN has a strategy to promote mental health nursing’s research and work on social media – do you?

Average Number of IJMHN Articles

2000–2006 = 35 per year
2007–2017 = 62 per year
2018–2021 = 135 per year

Making an Impact

The first IJMHN Impact Factor was 1.427 (2010). At time of writing, the most recent available Impact Factor is 3.503 (2020). That’s pretty amazing – the IJMHN is the highest-ranked mental health/psychiatric nursing journal, and is rated as the 5th most cited nursing journal in the world (in a field of 124 nursing journals).

A targeted social media strategy together with the increased volume of articles coincide with the Impact Factor upward trend starting in 2017.

Time will need to pass before we know whether the most recently reported Impact Factor is an anomaly of the pandemic. I make this observation because, at time of writing, the three most cited IJMHN papers are all from 2020, and each of these highly-cited articles discuss contemporary-at-the-time COVID-19 issues (see the “Most Cited” tab here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14470349).

Connecting with IJMHN

Website www.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/INM
Twitter twitter.com/IJMHN
Facebook www.facebook.com/IJMHN
LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/company/IJMHN

TL;DR

too long; didn’t read?

Watch the video – it’s less than 2 minutes long, and has a cool musical accompaniment (‘Dashed Ambitions’ by Moby, kindly provided gratis via mobygratis.com).

(video made by first making a Prezi)

End Notes

In case you missed it above, here’s the citation and link to the editorial:

McNamara, P. (2022), Happy anniversary IJMHN. International Journal of Mental Health Nursing. https://doi.org/10.1111/inm.13025

And the PDF version is here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/inm.13025

Thanks for reading this far. I would be grateful if you share either this blog page or – preferably – the article itself. Sharing is caring 🙂

As always, feedback is welcome via the comments section below.

Paul McNamara, 29 May 2022

Short URL: meta4RN.com/happy