The primary purpose of this project was to conduct a comprehensive scientometric analysis of physical therapy research in the Philippines. The project also aimed to quantify and analyze research output, collaboration patterns, citation impact, and emerging themes within the field to better understand the current state of physical therapy research in the country.
The study used scientometric approaches to analyze and summarize research productivity. The research team systematically mined publications from Web of Science, Scopus and PubMed using the keywords “physical therapy” OR “physiotherapy” OR “physical therapist” OR “physiotherapist.” These databases allowed extraction of information required for the analyses (i.e., author, publication, citation details, and abstract), as well as filtering of results by location, which could not be done in databases such as CINAHL and Google Scholar. Results were further refined to only include English publications by authors from the Philippines. Full records of each publication were then extracted as plain text files from the selected databases. Bibliometrix, tidyverse and dplyr packages of RStudio were used to merge data and remove duplicates and records with incomplete results. The VOSViewer thesaurus file was used to merge different variants of author, journal names, and institutional affiliations and synonyms. Publication, citation, collaboration, and text-co-occurrence network analysis were done using RStudio and VOSViewer.
A total of 122 publications from 1987 to 2022 were identified. Majority of the literature was primary studies (70.49%), secondary or review articles (13.93%) and proceedings of national and/or international conferences (10.65%). The most common and earliest collaborators of Filipino authors were from Australia, United States of America and Hong Kong. Five clusters of co-occurring keywords were identified: (1) case report, validity, function, mobility; (2) meta-analysis, systematic review, database, search; (3) perception, qualitative, barrier, value; (4) Evidence-based practice, attitude, need, confidence; and (5) COVID-19, pandemic, filipino, cross-sectional.
The findings of this study align with those from other countries and also with the scope of physiotherapy practice as defined by World Physiotherapy. The trends in research publications suggest the growing importance and development of physical therapy practice and education in the country. Variations in publication patterns were seen in terms of author affiliations and topics. The increasing number of publications in could be explained by the advancement of practice and efficiency of the research process through use of more sophisticated technology.
This study provides an overview and valuable guidance for physical therapy researchers, practitioners, educators, and policymakers to plan for the future direction of physical therapy research in the country. Stakeholders should consider the results of the study in identifying future projects to build capacity, develop research agendas and policy guidelines, and create collaborative opportunities to further improve physical therapy research productivity in the country.
Physical Therapy
Philippines
