Publication in 6 rehabilitation professions: a five-year professional-based bibliometric overview

Abstract

Evidence-based medicine is considered as mandatory especially in the field of drugs evaluation but is expanding to other fields such as surgery and medical devices. There is a general perception that EBP is not well developed in rehabilitation professions. Although needed, little is known about clinical research in rehabilitation professions: Are they any publication? What kind of research is published? Are publications indexed in the main database? RECLIP study therefore proposed to answer these questions through a bibliometric overview for 6 rehabilitation professions. A literature search was performed in Pubmed, Cochrane, Pedro, Pascal, Web of Sciences and OTseeker by rehabilitation professionals. The inclusion criteria were the following: originating from Europe, reporting clinical research, in the field of one of the 6 rehabilitation professions (audiology, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, speech therapy, orthoptics, psychomotricity), and published between 2007 and 2011. When the search resulted in more than 300 references, a sample of 300 references was drawn. After verification of inclusion criteria, articles were assessed for the publication language, indexation on Pubmed, impact factor and methodology. Among the retrieved references, 25% truly reported European clinical research in the rehabilitation field. The 5 European countries that published the most in rehabilitation field were United Kingdom, Sweden, Netherlands, Germany and France. Concerning methodology, repartition between descriptive, analytic and interventional studies varied greatly according to professions (p value <0.0001). Speech therapy had the most interventional pattern with 89% of publication being interventional followed by physiotherapy and audiology, on the opposite orthoptics was at less than 20%. This first bibliometric overview highlights the fact that there might be a lack of comparative research and that bibliographic searches are not adapted for rehabilitation professions, meaning that practices might not always be based on evidence, but rather on experience. Efforts should be made on indexation, and rehabilitation schools should focus on highlighting research to their students.