Two Minds Blog

Like clothing styles, ideas in the academy come into and out of fashion. I wrote a paper back in 2012 that attracted very little interest at the time, even though it was funded by a small grant from a National Institutes of Health center and published in a top-tier nursing journal. The paper has been cited only 4 times, which is not much, the last time in 2018. Literally no one has asked me about this paper in the past 10 years. I liked it at the time, but until recently it seemed like a dead letter. Despite having no new citations , though, I have started to get notifications from one of the scholarly tracking services that my article is being read again in the past 2 years -- and read more than it ever was back when it was new! Here's an "interest" graph from ResearchGate (the green line), which is based on readership and downloads rather than just the traditional citations metric: The current interest score isn't all that high, but it's still high enough to put...

In a recent post , I talked about the long-term effects that stress and secondary exposure to trauma can produce in nursing students. In a new study , my colleagues and I also looked at the consequences of stress exposure on back country search and rescue (BSAR) workers.  Here in Colorado, outdoor recreation is a $11.6 billion industry . Much of our state is public land, and people can hike, jeep, float, or ski wherever their interest takes them. It's possible to get into remote areas, far from any other human being, with relatively basic gear and limited experience. People therefore sometimes get in over their heads or get hurt out in the wilderness, and need to be rescued. Interestingly, the people who perform those rescues (at least outside of large ski resorts that have their own specialized patrols) are mostly volunteers . They are outdoor enthusiasts who like to help others and to work with specialized gear, but performing rescues is a side activity done in their free time, c...