Abstract
There has never been a more critical time for the development of cadres of younger, better-prepared nurse researchers. The following 3 current factors underscore this need: the current and prolonged nursing shortage that affects practice, research, and teaching; the increased emphasis on health promotion, disease prevention, and reduction in health disparities as articulated in Healthy People 2010; and the renewed effort to advance the image of nursing as an intellectual as well as compassionate enterprise. There are a limited number of institutions equipped to prepare these nurse scholars with undergraduate and graduate education and postdoctoral training in an accelerated manner, to provide mentoring throughout their education by funded faculty researchers, and to protect the focus of this career preparation and trajectory. Schools of nursing that have baccalaureate, master's, and doctoral programs and are highly ranked with respect to their National Institutes of Health funding have the opportunity and responsibility to create accelerated research-intensive tracks that link the baccalaureate through doctoral programs and move the graduates to postdoctoral training. These schools of nursing will have to identify which students to recruit and how the development of the research-intensive track will modify their schools' curricula and the institutions themselves. The profession will have to identify and create the environment that sanctions the legitimacy of scholars prepared in this way.
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