Abstract
Physical Therapy is a profession which development and conceptual framework have been performed in the XX century. One of the major challenges of Physical Therapy in the XXI century is to identify the intellectual basis of its scientific domain. The aim of the present paper is to analyze the evolution of Physical Therapy research throughout scientific literature published in Web of Science and Scopus databases. In order to perform the analysis, Web of Science and Scopus bibliographic databases were used to download all records. A set of journals with overall topics in Physical Therapy discipline with the largest history in the Journal Citation Report were selected: Physiotherapy, Physical Therapy, and Australian Journal of Physiotherapy/Journal of Physiotherapy. The bibliometric tool SciMAT was employed to perform a science mapping analysis in order to detect and visualize the research themes and their evolution across three periods: 1951-1984, 1985-2000 and 2001-2013. The analysis carried out shows that Physical Therapy research field is mainly divided into nine thematic areas: Middle Aged People, Muscle Function Alterations and Recovery, Health Education, Gait and Biomechanics, Central Nervous System, Heart Rate and Exercise, Diagnosis, Low Back Pain, and Animals. In conclusion, Physical Therapy citations and production are primarily focused on two large thematic areas, diseases that involve middle-aged population and muscle function and its alterations. Results can be used to provide a historical perspective on research conducted in this emerging field and to provide a scientific evidence-based practice model on which future studies can be built.
Highlights
The development and conceptual framework of Physical Therapy have been produced in the twentieth century (Massey, 2001, 2003; French and Dowds, 2008)
Science Mapping Analysis (SMA) (Cobo et al, 2011b) is a potent bibliometric technique, which combined with bibliometric co-word networks, is able to identify the structure of a research field through the use of the most important terms or keywords that compound the documents (Callon et al, 1983)
In order to carry out the analysis, Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases were used to retrieve the documents indexed in the three classics journals that compose the Physical Therapy core scientific publications in Rehabilitation category: Physiotherapy, Physical Therapy Journal, and Australian Journal of Physiotherapy/Journal of Physiotherapy
Summary
The development and conceptual framework of Physical Therapy have been produced in the twentieth century (Massey, 2001, 2003; French and Dowds, 2008). In relation to that knowledge, in the twenty-first century, Physical Therapy has a challenge to identify the intellectual basis of its scientific domain (Martínez-Fuentes et al, 2014). It would be interesting to see the evolution of Physical Therapy research over time and to know which themes are currently the most important and which can be the future trends. In this way, bibliometrics allows automatically classify studies over time into different themes and topics in order to facilitate the analysis of a research field (van Raan, 2005). Science Mapping Analysis (SMA) (Cobo et al, 2011b) is a potent bibliometric technique, which combined with bibliometric co-word networks, is able to identify the structure of a research field through the use of the most important terms or keywords that compound the documents (Callon et al, 1983)
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