This article is based on the historical contextualization about the development of research in nursing, presents the categories/lines of interest that support the human knowledge applied in the Doctorate Thesis in Nursing in Brazil, points out the archeological and genealogical methods proposed by Michel Foucault, and their possibility to make more difficult the day-to-day tasks of the nursing profession whether in Institutions, Public Policies, Health Reform, and Vocational Training, in the attempt to understand which strategies, challenges, knowledge base, and practices have influenced the building of the subjects.
nursing research; archeology; genealogy