A multidimensional analysis of the epistemic origins of nursing theories, models, and frameworks

The purpose of this article is to introduce our notion of epistemic space and to demonstrate its utility for understanding the origins and trajectories of nursing theory in the 20th century using multidimensional scaling (MDS). A literature review was conducted on primary and secondary sources written by and about 20 nurse theorists to investigate whether or not they cited 129 different scholars in the fields of anthropology, biology, nursing, philosophy, psychology, and sociology. Seventy-four scholars were identified as having been cited by at least two nurse theorists (319 citations total). Proximity scores, quantifying the similarity among nurse theorists based on proportions of shared citations, were calculated and analyzed using MDS. The emergent model of epistemic space that accommodated these similarities among nurse theorists revealed the systematic influence of scholars from various fields, notably psychology, biology, and philosophy. We believe that this schema and resulting taxonomy will prove useful for furthering our understanding of the relationships among nursing theories and theories in other fields of science.