GROWTH AND IMPACT OF PEER-REVIEWED PHYSIOTHERAPY JOURNALS

M. Barbero1, S. Vercelli1,2, E. Ravizzotti3, M. Paci4
1University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland, Department of Business Economics, Health and Social Care, Rehabilitation Research Laboratory 2rLab, Manno, Switzerland, 2Istituti Clinici Scientifici Maugeri, IRCCS, Gattico-Veruno (NO), Italy, 3University of Genoa, Department of Neuroscience, Rehabilitation, Ophthalmology, Genetics and Maternal Child Health (DINOGMI), Genoa, Italy, 4Azienda USL Toscana Centro, Firenze, Italy

Background: In a clinical science-based profession such as physiotherapy, research is mandatory to update knowledge and to provide cost-effective, high-quality treatments. The dissemination of research findings requires publication in peer-reviewed journals.

Purpose: The primary objective of this investigation was to identify scientific journals that publishand disseminate research focusing on the development of physiotherapists' practice. The secondary objective was to describe their production and their scholarly impact between 2000 and 2021.

Methods: Both the Journal Citation Reports™ (Category: Rehabilitation; Edition: Science Citation Index Expanded, SCIE) and the International Society of Physiotherapy Journal Editors (ISPJE) lists of journals were searched. Journals were included if they were indexed in Scopus, their aims and scope explicitly covered physiotherapy, their Editor-in-Chief was a physiotherapist, and their articles were published in English. Journals that ceased publishing before January 2022 were excluded. For each selected journal, a CSV file was downloaded from the Scopus database. A filter was used to limit the retrieved articles between 2000 and 2021. The Scopus CiteScore was also extracted for each journal from 2011 to 2021. The following data were computed for the selected journals in the selected periods: (1) the total number of articles published and their citations; (2) the average (SD) annual increase of publications; (3) the average (SD) increase in citations in relation to the years passed since publication; (4) the average (SD) annual increase of the CiteScore.

Results: Twenty-six physiotherapy journals were identified with a total of 26.642 papers published and 457.989citations between 2000 and 2021. The mean annual increase of publications was 6.4% (SD: 8.8), while the mean increase in citations in relation to the years passed since the publication was 1.4 (SD: 3.4). The mean annual increase of the CiteScore from 2011 to 2021 was 0.1 (SD: 0.16).

Conclusions: Physiotherapy journals increase their performances over time in terms of published articles, citations, and bibliometric scores, with high variability among journals.

Implications: This study provides a homogeneous list of physiotherapy journals. This issue may allow to further analyze journals’ performances and compare groups of journals from different fields.

Funding acknowledgements: n/a

Keywords:
Physiotherapy
Periodicals
CiteScore

Topics:
Research methodology, knowledge translation & implementation science
Professional issues
Professional practice: other

Did this work require ethics approval? No
Reason: Ethics approval was not required because the investigation does not involve humans, animals or sensitive information.

All authors, affiliations and abstracts have been published as submitted.

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