An inventory of theses defended by nurses in France on the eve of the birth of the discipline of nursing

The year 2019 saw nursing science become an official discipline in France, following the academization process initiated in 2009. Although nurses did not wait for this breakthrough to embark on doctoral-level courses, the absence of a dedicated academic nursing pathway has meant that it has not been possible to gain an overall picture of the theses written by nurses in French universities. The aim of this contribution is to compile an inventory of these theses by identifying the disciplinary fields in which the nurses defended them, as well as the preferred methodological approaches adopted. Following a computerized search using various databases, 132 theses were identified spanning a forty-year period, with a significant increase over the last ten years. Eighty-four percent of these doctoral theses were defended in the disciplines of humanities and social sciences, with a very large proportion in education sciences. Qualitative methods were preferred, with investigations that used interviews. The number of theses in the biological and health sciences has seen a recent increase. This inventory provides a benchmark for the doctoral output of nurses at a pivotal point in their professional history.