Mapping the literature of occupational therapy: an update

Jonathan Potter

doi:10.3163/1536-5050.98.3.012

Abstract

This study updated Reed's 1999 "Mapping the Literature of Occupational Therapy." An analysis of citation patterns and indexing coverage was undertaken to identify the core literature of occupational therapy and to determine access to that literature. Citations from three source journals for the years 2006 through 2008 were studied following the common methodology of the "Mapping the Literature of Allied Health Project." Bradford's Law of Scattering was applied to analyze the productivity of cited journals. A comparative analysis of indexing was conducted across three bibliographic databases. A total of 364 articles cited 10,425 references. Journals were the most frequently cited format, accounting for 65.3% of the references, an increase of 4.1% over the 1999 study. Approximately one-third of the journal references cited a cluster of 9 journals, with the American Journal of Occupational Therapy dominating the field. An additional 120 journals were identified as moderately important based on times cited. CINAHL provided the most comprehensive indexing of core journals, while MEDLINE provided the best overall coverage. Occupational therapy is a multidisciplinary field with a strong core identity and an increasingly diverse literature. Indexing has improved overall since 1999, but gaps in the coverage are still evident.

Highlights

In 1997, the Nursing and Allied Health Resources Section (NAHRS) of the Medical Library Association (MLA) launched the ‘‘Mapping the Literature of Allied Health Project.’’ From its inception, the project has employed a common bibliometric methodology, based in part on Bradford’s Law of Scattering [1], to analyze or ‘‘map’’ the bibliographic patterns at play in a variety of allied health disciplines, including occupational therapy, the discipline covered by the present study
AHIP, the original project editor and author of one early study [2], encapsulated the project’s overarching rationale: ‘‘Because bibliographic references that appear in journal articles provide a measurable path of information transfer occurring within a field, it is possible to assess quantitatively the characteristics of the literature of that field: the type of literature used, its currency, the core journals, and the extent of dispersion of the journal literature’’ [3]
Athletic training [5] and health care management [6] are the two most recent allied health disciplines to be included in the project

Summary

Introduction

In 1997, the Nursing and Allied Health Resources Section (NAHRS) of the Medical Library Association (MLA) launched the ‘‘Mapping the Literature of Allied Health Project.’’ From its inception, the project has employed a common bibliometric methodology, based in part on Bradford’s Law of Scattering [1], to analyze or ‘‘map’’ the bibliographic patterns at play in a variety of allied health disciplines, including occupational therapy, the discipline covered by the present study. The allied health project has given rise to fifteen mapping studies covering a diverse range of allied health disciplines [4]. As of this writing, athletic training [5] and health care management [6] are the two most recent allied health disciplines to be included in the project. The companion project covering nursingrelated fields has produced seventeen studies [7]

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Conclusion