Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore the direction for development of the Korean Journal of Adult Nursing toward becoming an international journal through analysing the accepted and rejected papers during the last three years (2007-2009). Methods: Two hundred and ten accepted papers were analyzed focusing on research methodology and key words using descriptive statistics. In addition, rejected papers were reviewed to analyze their study designs and key words. Results: The proportion of quantitative research was 86.4% while the proportion of qualitative research was 9.5%. The majority of the qualitative research design was survey (71.8%). Sixty percent of the research had verbal consent and 32.7% had written consent from the participants. The prevailing data collection settings were hospitals (52.1%), and community (22.7%). The most frequently used research domain was health. It was noted that theoretical framework was rarely presented. The paper rejection rate was 31.5% and among the rejected paper, 75.3% was survey. Conclusion: The results of this analysis suggest that published studies have been improved and diversified compared with the papers published before the year 2007. However, translation research, clinical trials by nurses, and more detailed evaluation process for ethics in research need to be facilitated.