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“I would say Bonnie [Wakefield] is more hands-on when it comes to the studies that she’s doing, such as keeping track of how many patients are involved,” Morse says. She says physicians involved in research tend to spend less time with patients and find their time divided between research, making rounds with patients not involved in research, and running clinics, among other things. That leaves less time to devote to hands-on involvement in their research, she says.

“After all is said and done, I would say the nurses who are just involved in research 85 watch a little more closely,” she says.

Wakefield says that one of the primary differences she sees between physician researchers and nurse researchers is that physician researchers are more likely to conduct “bench research” in a laboratory setting. This can involve the use of animals or cell lines rather than working with patients.

“It’s not as if nurses couldn’t do that, but it’s less typical for nurses to do bench research,” she says. She says physicians often focus more on interventions that might cure a disease like a surgical procedure or research on a particular medicine.

Wakefield says what she finds enjoyable about research is finding ways to improve patient care by systematically evaluating interventions. One of the main challenges, she says, is recruiting patients to participate in a study, because they tend to be a bit suspicious of researchers.

“They think you’re going to do some kind of questionable experiment on them,” she says. “It’s sometimes challenging to convince patients that this is a good study to enroll in.”

Grady says researchers often have several studies running concurrently and they’re usually in different phases. The first step is to come up with an idea and review the literature to get a feeling for what is known. A researcher looks for gaps in this knowledge, designs a study to capture that knowledge, and writes grants seeking funding.

Researchers must work with others to gather information from patients and often must train people to collect the needed information. They then analyze the data that comes in, find ways to quantify it, and examine it in a systematic way. The next step is to come to some conclusions based on the data and to identify the study’s limitations. Then the researcher must write up the results, getting critiques from colleagues along the way, before publishing it and inviting further critiques from the scientific community at large. Researchers also must present their findings to internal review boards and, at times, external groups.

“In any one day, a person can be doing any of those activities,” Grady says. “It is really a career with a great deal of variety.”

Grady says what she enjoys about research is the freedom it gives her to study whatever interests her, although the lack of guideposts might make some uncomfortable.

“The good news is that as you develop new things, a good study often generates as many questions as it does answers,” she says. “It’s a self-renewing process.”

Long-term commitment

One downside is the amount of time it takes to complete a study, Grady says. Buffum agrees. “You have to be very persistent and tenacious and you have to have passion and belief that will carry you through all those years and be important enough to last,” she says.

Another negative to research, Morse says, is that studies have a finite time line, which means a nurse might run out of work when the research project is finished.

“You always have to kind of consider what’s going to happen when this particular study is finished,” she says.

She also finds it hard to distance herself from her work.

“It’s not easy to take a vacation,” she says. “Many times, I’m checking my voicemail daily when I’m on vacation.”

Goode says any nurse who wants to become involved in nursing research should turn to the nearest school of nursing to offer their services. “I think all nurses need some scholarly focus,” she says. Many institutions have research committees that would likely welcome interest from nurses whether or not they have advanced degrees.

Grady says the NINR encourages nurses to become involved in research. She says it’s one of the most rewarding things a nurse can do.

“What I most wanted to do was to be able to make a difference, to be able to create new information that was helpful to people, and it’s a rare privilege that individuals have to literally create new knowledge,” she says.

“If you have an opportunity to do something like that, it is just simply hard not to do it.”

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