Beyond Scientific Rigor in Research: What Values Does the 2025 ICN Definition Promote?
What this paper is about
Cleofas, J. V. (2026). An axiological (re)appraisal of nursing in the light of the 2025 ICN definition: Implications for research development in doctoral education. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 82(5), 4442–4458. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.70176
What this paper is about
This paper asks a deceptively simple question: What does nursing value now?
In June 2025, the International Council of Nurses released a new global definition of nursing. Definitions may look like simple wording changes, but in professions they do much more. They tell the public what a profession is for. They guide education, research, policy, regulation, ethical codes, and professional identity.
This paper argues that the new ICN definition does not only update nursing’s scope. It signals an axiological shift. Axiology means the study of values: what is considered good, right, worthwhile, and worth pursuing. In nursing, axiology asks: What kind of care matters? What kind of knowledge should nurses produce? What responsibilities does nursing have to people, communities, systems, and the planet?
The paper’s main claim is that nursing research must now align more explicitly with nursing’s expanded values. It is not enough for nursing research to be scientifically rigorous. It must also be ethically grounded, socially responsive, relational, justice-oriented, and attentive to planetary health.
Why this matters
Nursing has always carried values. Earlier traditions emphasized compassion, altruism, loyalty, obedience, care, and service. Later professionalization brought stronger emphasis on science, evidence-based practice, autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice. More recently, digital health, robotics, global inequities, ecological crisis, and cultural safety have expanded the profession’s ethical horizon.
The 2025 ICN definition reflects this wider horizon. It presents nursing as a profession dedicated to the right to health, equitable access, culturally safe and people-centred care, sustainable environments, safety, continuity of care, health system leadership, science-based knowledge, ethical standards, therapeutic relationships, compassion, social justice, and a better future for humanity.
That is a large claim about what nursing is. The paper asks: If nursing now defines itself this way, what should nursing research and doctoral education become?
What the author did
This is a critical discussion paper, not an empirical study with participants. The author used retroductive analysis informed by critical discourse analysis and emancipatory nursing knowledge development.
In plain language, the paper carefully reads the 2025 ICN definition and asks: What values are visible in the words? What values are implied? Who is positioned as responsible? What actions are expected of nursing? What older definitions or global health ideas does the new definition echo?
The analysis used several discourse tools: lexical choices, transitivity, modality, representation of discourses, and intertextuality. These help reveal how the definition constructs nursing as an active, morally responsible, globally engaged profession.
What the paper found
1) Nursing is redefined around human rights and social justice
The first major value shift is toward health as a universal right. The new definition says nursing is dedicated to upholding everyone’s right to the highest attainable standard of health and to equitable access to health and healthcare.
This matters because it moves nursing beyond individual bedside care. It positions nursing as part of the struggle against health inequities, exclusion, and structural barriers. Under this view, nurses are not only caregivers. They are also advocates for fair access, human rights, and distributive justice.
2) Nursing remains deeply relational
The second value theme is people-centred, collaborative, culturally safe, and safe care. The definition emphasizes professional care in the most personal health-related aspects of people’s lives. It also highlights therapeutic relationships and ethical standards.
In simple terms: nursing remains human work. Even as nursing becomes more technical and system-oriented, it still depends on trust, cultural safety, relational skill, and attention to lived experience.
This has research implications. Nursing research should not only measure outcomes. It should also study patient experience, cultural safety, relational care, communication, dignity, and trust.
3) Nursing now has an explicit planetary responsibility
The third theme is global responsibility and environmental stewardship. The new definition includes “safe, sustainable environments” and “a better future for humanity.”
This is an important expansion. It means nursing’s ethical responsibility does not stop at the person, the hospital, or the health system. It includes ecological conditions that make health possible: climate, environment, sustainability, and the health of future generations.
The paper argues that this pushes nursing research toward planetary health, climate justice, disaster vulnerability, environmental determinants of health, and sustainable healthcare.
4) Nursing is positioned as an active leader, not a passive helper
The fourth theme is professional authority and transformative leadership. The definition uses active verbs: nursing acts, advocates, promotes, protects, manages, and leads.
This matters because nursing is not presented as simply assisting other professions. It is presented as an active force in healthcare organizations and systems.
The paper’s discourse analysis shows that the definition uses strong declarative language. It does not say nursing “may” advocate or “might” lead. It presents these roles as defining features of the profession.
5) Nursing research definitions have not fully caught up
The paper then compares this expanded axiology with common definitions of nursing research. The problem is that nursing research definitions often emphasize scientific rigour, systematic inquiry, evidence, knowledge generation, and practice improvement—but they may not explicitly include the newer commitments to social justice, planetary health, cultural safety, and transformative praxis.
This creates a gap. Nursing’s professional definition is becoming more justice-oriented and globally accountable, but nursing research may still be described in narrower scientific terms.
The paper does not reject scientific rigour. Instead, it argues that rigour should be joined with values. Nursing research should ask not only, “Is this study methodologically sound?” but also, “What values does this study advance? Whose health does it prioritize? What injustices does it challenge? What future does it help make possible?”
The proposed framework: ADRDSF
The paper proposes the Axiologically-Driven Research Development Strategy Framework, or ADRDSF. This framework helps doctoral nursing programs align research development with the values of the 2025 ICN definition.
The framework combines three elements:
- the four axiological commitments identified in the ICN definition;
- the Vitae Researcher Development Framework, organized here into researcher, research, and research communities; and
- the three doctoral nursing pathways: PhD, DNP, and DNE/EdD/PhD in Nursing Education.
For PhD students
PhD students are positioned as knowledge generators. The paper suggests that PhD education should cultivate critical consciousness, ethical reflexivity, health equity research skills, participatory methods, mixed methods, interdisciplinary collaboration, and research agendas rooted in social justice and planetary health.
For DNP students
DNP students are positioned as practice innovators. Their research development should focus on translating evidence into practice, improving equitable access, strengthening safety, leading implementation projects, evaluating practice change, and partnering with healthcare leaders, policymakers, and communities.
For DNE/EdD/PhDNEd students
Doctoral students in nursing education are positioned as pedagogical leaders. Their research should help redesign curricula, teaching strategies, and learning environments so future nurses are prepared for health equity, culturally safe care, planetary health, and leadership.
Bottom line
This paper argues that nursing research cannot be value-neutral. If nursing is now globally defined through human rights, social justice, relational care, planetary health, and transformative leadership, then doctoral nursing education must prepare scholars who can research, teach, lead, and advocate from those values.
Policy/practice recommendations
- Make values explicit in doctoral nursing research training
Doctoral programs should teach students to identify the axiological commitments of their research, not only their research design and methodology. - Update research development frameworks
PhD, DNP, and nursing education doctorates should integrate social justice, human rights, cultural safety, planetary health, and leadership into research competencies. - Teach critical and emancipatory inquiry
Doctoral students should learn how research can expose power, challenge inequity, and support transformative change. - Align dissertations and capstones with nursing’s expanded values
Research topics, practice projects, and education studies can be evaluated not only for feasibility and rigour, but also for their contribution to equity, relational care, sustainability, and systems change. - Build interdisciplinary and community partnerships
The ADRDSF emphasizes research communities. Nursing doctoral programs should connect students with communities, policymakers, health systems, patient groups, and scholars from other disciplines. - Do not use ADRDSF as a one-size-fits-all mandate
The paper cautions that the framework must be adapted to local contexts, health priorities, institutional capacities, and resource constraints. - Support Global South doctoral nursing development
The paper notes that doctoral nursing education remains uneven globally. Research development strategies must be adaptable for regions where formal doctoral programs are scarce.
Glossary of key terms
- Axiology — The philosophical study of values: what is good, right, worthwhile, and worth pursuing.
- Axiological shift — A change in the values that guide a profession, practice, or field of knowledge.
- 2025 ICN definition of nursing — The updated global definition of nursing released by the International Council of Nurses in June 2025.
- Nursing research — Systematic inquiry that generates, tests, applies, or translates knowledge to improve nursing, health, care, and systems.
- Critical discussion paper — A scholarly paper that develops an argument through conceptual, philosophical, or textual analysis rather than empirical data collection.
- Retroductive analysis — A mode of reasoning that asks what deeper structures, mechanisms, or conditions explain what is observed in a text or phenomenon.
- Critical discourse analysis / CDA — A method for studying how language constructs power, values, identity, and social meaning.
- Emancipatory nursing — A nursing approach focused on social justice, freedom, power critique, and transformation of oppressive structures.
- Human rights — Rights that belong to all people, including the right to the highest attainable standard of health.
- Equitable access — Fair access to health and healthcare, especially for groups facing structural barriers.
- People-centred care — Care organized around people’s needs, values, experiences, and dignity.
- Culturally safe care — Care that recognizes power differences, avoids cultural harm, and respects people’s cultural identities and contexts.
- Relationality — The idea that care and knowledge are shaped through relationships, trust, connection, and mutual responsibility.
- Planetary health — A field focused on the health of humans and the natural systems that sustain life.
- Environmental stewardship — The responsibility to protect environments that support health now and in the future.
- Transformative leadership — Leadership that changes systems, challenges inequities, and moves practice toward better futures.
- ADRDSF — Axiologically-Driven Research Development Strategy Framework; the paper’s proposed framework for aligning doctoral nursing research development with nursing’s expanded values.
- Vitae Researcher Development Framework / RDF — A framework used to describe researcher capabilities, adapted in this paper into researcher, research, and research communities.
- PhD in Nursing — A research-focused doctorate that prepares nurse scientists to generate knowledge.
- DNP — Doctor of Nursing Practice; a practice-focused doctorate that prepares nurses to translate evidence and lead system-level improvements.
- DNE / EdD / PhDNEd — Doctoral pathways focused on nursing education, pedagogy, curriculum, and educational leadership.
- Researcher — In the ADRDSF, the personal qualities, identity, reflexivity, and intellectual commitments of the doctoral scholar.
- Research — In the ADRDSF, the methods, designs, skills, and processes used to conduct inquiry.
- Research communities — In the ADRDSF, the networks, collaborators, communities, institutions, and publics with whom research is developed and used.
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