Physical therapy: A worldwide overview

Abstract

The current population rate has increasing the number of inhabitants with some kind of disability. In this work a proposal to determining trends, research groups, authors, countries, journals and organizations about Physical Therapy has done. The study is based on the Web of Science (WoS) database, where were found 77,960 documents regarding Physical Therapy; the category with most documents published is Rehabilitation with 13%; the most prolific author is PhD Julie Fritz from the University of Utah with more 10,000 citations; the organization with the greatest number of documents is the University of Toronto; a map of the countries with most documents is presented and shows that United States of America (USA) is the number one. The top 5 of journals is leaded by Physical Therapy journal. A clustering analysis to find out groups of researchers and main keywords show that there are 38 clusters where there is a high collaboration between authors; the collaboration between organizations shows that the University of Toronto interacted with several organizations; regarding keywords, the most used is Therapy, followed by rehabilitation, physical-activity and quality of life.