Nursing studies require diligence and patience, just like the occupation itself. However, when the professors let you choose the research topic for yourself, it can be near impossible to come up with an idea.
After all, the topic should be relevant to the current issues, come with enough unanswered questions for you to sink your teeth into, and still have enough prior research to act as supporting evidence for your paper. When you think about picking the research topic in these terms, the choice becomes even harder. To help you find inspiration, we’ve collected a few dozen good nursing research topics that fit the requirements to a T. Enjoy!
50 Nursing Research Topic Ideas You Can Use
For your comfort, we’ve divided the fifty topics into five sections by their relevance and field of study. Still, we urge you to look through the whole selection if you don’t find anything to catch your eye within a single section.
Please, do not treat these topics as set in stone. Instead, play around with the scope and wording. Make any topic you choose your own, and your research paper will rise to a new level of awesome.
Controversial Nursing Topics for 2021
Let’s start with the most exciting ideas of the bunch. Controversial topics are far from safe. Whichever side of the argument you choose to support, be ready to face opposition among your peers and professors. Go with a controversial idea if you want to stir a discussion or feel strongly about the discussed issue:
- Compare postoperative pain management and outcomes across two or more countries.
- Health literacy and its correlation with self-efficacy in Type 2 diabetes mellitus patients.
- Discuss the unmet care needs of transplant recipients’ families.
- The connection between smartphone use and college students’ insomnia, stress, and anxiety.
- Medication adherence in cardiac patients and the role of drug-related beliefs.
- The dramatic changes in occupational satisfaction among nurses throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.
- The efficacy of medical students shadowing experienced nurses to build interprofessional skills.
- The reasons for low Covid-19 vaccination readiness among nursing staff and students.
- The development of secondary traumatic stress in nurses.
- Registered nurse’s role in primary health care in the 21st century.
If you want to stay on the safe side but still use a topic with high visibility, skip to the last category on this list. You’ll be sure to find what you’re looking for among the hot nursing topics.
Psychiatric Nursing Research Topics
Psychiatry takes a special place among medical research, as many cognitive and mental disorders and conditions are still hardly understood. Besides, psychiatric patients call for specialized care that differs greatly from regular hospitals. Considering these limitations, we’ve created a list of research topics for nursing students intended for psychiatric wards:
- What affects the physical restraints of the neurosurgical intensive care unit patients?
- Schizophrenia population’s communication strategies and relationship building.
- Modeling the interpersonal processes of psychiatric nurses.
- Situation-specific emergency handling for patients with persistent mental disorders.
- Shaming and stigma experienced by patients with mood and anxiety disorders.
- A nurse’s perspective on the differences in diagnosing and treatment of ADHD in children and adults.
- Covid-19 pandemic restrictions affecting patients with pre-existing mental health conditions.
- The correlation between infant mental health and mother’s perinatal depression.
- Violence risk assessment tools for patients with acute mental health conditions.
- An insight into the silence surrounding mental health issues within a school environment.
You may need to tweak these ideas a little to fit your class or major better. When making the final decision about the topic you wish to research, make sure to do a preliminary search for credible sources.
Pediatric Research Topics for Nursing
Pediatric nursing can be equally rewarding and heartbreaking, and picking the right topic for a research paper is challenging. We’ve scoured the latest scientific articles and trends to come up with a list of ideas that will remain relevant for at least a couple of years. And you should be able to find credible sources for your research, as these topics are gaining traction within the medical community:
- The efficacy of stimulating olfactory receptors in preterm infants using breast milk.
- The use of antenatal education on labor, depression, anxiety, and childbirth pain.
- Addressing the informational needs of parents raising a child with asthma.
- The use of educational comic stories describing treatment specifics to mitigate anxiety in children undergoing surgery.
- The influence of Covid-19 pandemic on the spread of child obesity.
- The correlation between parenting approaches and children’s screen time throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.
- Analyzing the efficacy of pet therapy in mitigating anxiety among hospitalized children.
- The role of a nurse in providing Covid-19 vaccination among children.
- The ways Internet addiction affects teenagers’ lifestyles.
- The changes in sport guidelines for children post-Covid-19.
As you see, the ongoing pandemic is front and center across pediatric topics, mostly because the effects of vaccines and treatments on children are less well-researched. However, you don’t have to go into Covid-19 research if you don’t want to. After all, there are plenty of cutting-edge protocols, treatments, and approaches that haven’t been around long. You can pick any of those to write about, and you can always edit the topics above to narrow down the scope of your research. It could be as simple as specifying the age of the patient group or the country of focus.
Quantitative Nursing Research Topics
Qualitative and quantitative research go hand in hand, though sometimes your professors want to see hard facts and numbers instead of theories and arguments. While most topics can be assessed qualitatively, quantitative ideas are harder to come by. Besides, procuring the numbers for your paper can be a pain unless you have access to relevant research figures or a database of test results.
To make your choice easier, we’ve devised ten nursing research topics you can use:
- The assessment of diet, symptom severity, and pain levels in patients with fibromyalgia.
- The correlation between the health status of patients with heart failure and their depression, sleep apnea, and daytime sleepiness.
- The quantitative assessment of pelvic floor muscle strength in women of reproductive age.
- A quantitative study of mobility and activity levels of hospitalized adults.
- Quantitative analysis of the influence of exercise on menopausal women’s cardiovascular health, body composition, and bone mineral density.
- The study of symptom clusters in patients with heart failure.
- The effect of the nurses’ perceived workload on their work-life balance satisfaction.
- Quantitative assessment of family dynamics and brain injury recovery rates.
- Analyzing physical activity levels among nursing home residents with cognitive disorders.
- Quantitative assessment of kidney function performance.
Quantitative analysis can be applied to any field of study as long as you adjust your research parameters. You can mix and match the parameters and scope of these ideas to make them your own.
Hot Topics in Nursing Research
We’ve saved the best for last, for those patient few who know to scroll through the whole list before making the final choice. These are the cream of the crop, the most intriguing and exciting ideas that will get your paper noticed if you play your cards right:
- Nursing care satisfaction as related to the post-surgery readiness for discharge among senior patients.
- The changes in caregiving approaches throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.
- Face mask utilization parameters to prevent Covid-19 pandemic among the caregivers of quarantined patients.
- Coping strategy mediation in advanced cancer patients.
- Distorted memories and other mental issues among ICU patients.
- Mental health issues and sleep disorders among nursing staff during the Covid-19 pandemic.
- The energy drink overuse among medical students caused by Covid-19.
- Self-efficacy training for senior patients with hip fracture injuries.
- Stress-reducing effects of the online communication between nurses and Covid-19 patients and their family members.
- The nurses’ outlook on IoT-based devices and services adoption in hospitals.
Remember that hot nursing research paper topics don’t stay so hot for long. They are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, these ideas are hot because everyone is looking into research and racing to get the results out. On the other hand, as soon as the niche gets oversaturated with articles, these topics will stop being hot and turn boring overnight. That will make them easier to research and write about but will also slash your chances of getting extra points for originality.
Here you go. Now you have fifty options to choose from and at least a few great nursing topics to write about.