Evolutionary Analysis of International Scientific Output in Occupational Therapy from 1917 to 2020.

Maria Cristina Espinosa-Sempere,Concepción Carratalá-Munuera,Virtudes Pérez-Jover,Jose A Quesada,Adriana López-Pineda

doi:10.3390/ijerph182312740

Maria Cristina Espinosa-Sempere, Concepción Carratalá-Munuera + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph182312740

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Abstract

Published evidence on the progress of occupational therapy research from a broad perspective is limited. The purpose of this study was to analyze the international research productivity on occupational therapy from 1917 to 2020. This was a bibliometric study including articles indexed on MEDLINE, Scopus, and CINAHL. The literature search was conducted in June 2021 using the descriptor “occupational therapy” and the term “Ergotherap*”, and was limited to citable documents. Price’s law and Bradford’s law were applied to analyze a number of bibliometric indicators. Research on occupational therapy had an average annual growth rate of 26.4% and followed an exponential model. The top producing countries were the USA (21.52%) and the UK (6.07%). There is a high transience index of 74.81%. The top producing author was Kielhofner, G. (n = 132). Studies with the highest reported scientific evidence accounted for 1.13% (n = 638) of the total number of publications. More randomized controlled trials are necessary to increase the quality of the evidence base. Moreover, a greater collaboration between authors is needed for the professionalization of this research field.

Highlights

Scientific publication is the most objective and practical way of transmitting research results, and its visibility is a valued aspect for both researchers and research institutions and organizations [1]
The quantitative analysis of scientific publications through bibliometrics allows us to evaluate the results of scientific activity in terms of volume, visibility, evolution, and structure [2,3], and helps us to know the relative weight of the different lines of research and methodological orientations [4,5]
The mean annual contribution of occupational therapy research to global scientific production over the study period was 42.27 papers per 100,000 publications indexed in MEDLINE, 55.56 papers in SCOPUS, and 172.2 papers in CINAHL

Summary

Introduction

Scientific publication is the most objective and practical way of transmitting research results, and its visibility is a valued aspect for both researchers and research institutions and organizations [1]. The growth of scientific production has strengthened the use of bibliometrics in occupational therapy, and the first bibliometric studies on different issues of this discipline appeared in the 1980s. Most of these studies analyzed the journals considered to be most representative of the subject area [9,10,11], while other authors studied a country or institution such as Brown et al [12] who analyzed the research publications by Australian authors. Other researchers explored the scientific literature on a specific subject area

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