Occupational therapy publications by Australian authors: A bibliometric analysis

Abstract

The volume of occupational therapy peer-reviewed literature has grown over the last two decades. Australian authors have and continue to make significant contributions to the occupational therapy body of knowledge nationally and internationally.

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

“…However, our data also show that collaboration has steadily increased, especially since 2010. A previous bibliometric study on occupational therapy publications by Australian authors reported a variation of the co-authorship rate from 1.3 in 1991 to 4.2 in 2015 [ 12 ]. This upward trend can be explained by the need for larger, more statistically powerful studies, the availability of funding to support cross-national data collection, and the availability and ease of use of social networks as a means to increase dialogue between research experts [ 29 ].…”

“…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 of occupational therapy, for example, Larsson, Haglund, and Hagberg [ 13 ] focused on geriatrics, Gutman and Raphael-Greenfield [ 14 ] focused on mental health, and Castro-Alzate et al [ 15 ] focused on mirror therapy.…”

Characteristics of research with older people (over 65 years) in occupational therapy journals, 2013–2017

“…journals that publish discipline-related research [18]) concerning occupational therapy. There are several profession-specific journals relating to occupational therapy but not all have a journal impact factor [17,18]. To include articles based only on journal impact factor, there is a risk that relevant articles concerning occupational therapy will be excluded [18] since scholars in occupational therapy do not always choose journals to publish in based on impact factor [20].…”

“…To include articles based only on journal impact factor, there is a risk that relevant articles concerning occupational therapy will be excluded [18] since scholars in occupational therapy do not always choose journals to publish in based on impact factor [20]. Thus, in this review, journals were selected on the basis of the following criteria: peer-reviewed occupational therapy journals, published in English and accessible through the electronic databases Medline, OTDBase, and Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CHINAL) [17]. The selected journals are presented in Table 1.…”

“…Literature reviews can also be used to present the characteristics of articles published in a certain research field [11] or to review certain areas or topics of articles published in occupational therapy journals [6,8,9,[12][13][14]. Previous research concerning articles published in the field of occupational therapy has analyzed the references used in publications [6,15,16], or quantified the influence of scholarly activities [17][18][19]. In recent years, there has been an increased interest in developing research about older people in the field of occupational therapy [9], and both the quality (i.e.…”