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Carballo-Costa L1, Vivas Costa J1, Costas R2
1Universidade da Coruña / University of A Coruna, Grupo de Investigación en Intervención Psicosocial y Rehabilitación Funcional. Department of Physiotherapy, Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, A Coruna, Spain, 2Leiden University/ (CWTS) Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden, Netherlands
Background: Research in physiotherapy has grown rapidly during the last few years. However, the cognitive structure of the discipline, defined by its main research lines, and its temporal evolution and impact have not yet been thoroughly studied. Visualisation techniques based on bibliometric data allow obtaining overview of the different research topics within a discipline. This study presents a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of the main research lines in physiotherapy.
Purpose: The aims of this study are:
-to delineate the discipline of physiotherapy and visualise its cognitive structure at worldwide level.
- to study their temporal evolution and citation impact.
Methods: This is a bibliometric, descriptive and retrospective study. We identified Web of Science publications from the field of physiotherapy in the period 2000-2016 according to the following process:
1) We used a group of core keywords to identify a primary set of publications related with physiotherapy: “physiotherapy”, “physical therapy”, “manual therapy”, “therapeutical exercise” and “exercise therapy.
2) Based on the previous core set, we identified the most important journals and micro-fields (clusters of thematically related publications by citation network relations)
3) We collected publications from these journals and clusters to get a final expanded set of articles and reviews, thus conforming the final set of publications that can be considered to belong to the disciplinary realm of physiotherapy.
From the titles and abstracts of these publications, authors extracted the main physiotherapy-related terms, selected by VOSviewer software. We developed a thesaurus to account for the language inconsistencies of the terms (e.g. homonyms and synonyms) and select the final set of terms. VOSviewer software created a visualisation, by means of a technique for clustering these terms into “research lines” (i.e. the most important topics studied in the literature). We also analysed temporal evolution of the research lines and their citation impact.
Results: We identified 67,027 publications related to physiotherapy in Web of Science. The final term map showed 8 clusters of terms related to the following research lines:
· movement and gait
· pain related with different pathologies
· education and professional issues
· neurology
· evidence-based practice
· traumatology and surgery, specially related to the knee
· cardiorespiratory physiotherapy
· psychometrics.
Terms related with evidence-based practice cluster were more frequent at the end of period 2000-2016, followed by some terms related with clusters of pain and health education. We did not observe relevant differences amongst research lines in terms of citation. The graphs can be seen in http://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.7054568
Conclusion(s): Our bibliometric visualisation approach makes possible to study the cognitive structure in physiotherapy. We identify that the citation impact of research lines is quite homogeneous, while their temporal evolution shows an alignment with the WCPT Policy Statement on Research with an increasing of evidence-based practice publications in the most recent years.
Implications: The approach proposed is very useful for improving the understanding of a complex research topic such as physiotherapy, which allows policy makers and researchers to identify new research directions and the discussion of research priorities.
Keywords: Bibliometrics, Physiotherapy, Research
Funding acknowledgements: This work was supported by the grant for predoctoral students “Estadías predoutorais de investigación Inditex-UDC 2017”.
Purpose: The aims of this study are:
-to delineate the discipline of physiotherapy and visualise its cognitive structure at worldwide level.
- to study their temporal evolution and citation impact.
Methods: This is a bibliometric, descriptive and retrospective study. We identified Web of Science publications from the field of physiotherapy in the period 2000-2016 according to the following process:
1) We used a group of core keywords to identify a primary set of publications related with physiotherapy: “physiotherapy”, “physical therapy”, “manual therapy”, “therapeutical exercise” and “exercise therapy.
2) Based on the previous core set, we identified the most important journals and micro-fields (clusters of thematically related publications by citation network relations)
3) We collected publications from these journals and clusters to get a final expanded set of articles and reviews, thus conforming the final set of publications that can be considered to belong to the disciplinary realm of physiotherapy.
From the titles and abstracts of these publications, authors extracted the main physiotherapy-related terms, selected by VOSviewer software. We developed a thesaurus to account for the language inconsistencies of the terms (e.g. homonyms and synonyms) and select the final set of terms. VOSviewer software created a visualisation, by means of a technique for clustering these terms into “research lines” (i.e. the most important topics studied in the literature). We also analysed temporal evolution of the research lines and their citation impact.
Results: We identified 67,027 publications related to physiotherapy in Web of Science. The final term map showed 8 clusters of terms related to the following research lines:
· movement and gait
· pain related with different pathologies
· education and professional issues
· neurology
· evidence-based practice
· traumatology and surgery, specially related to the knee
· cardiorespiratory physiotherapy
· psychometrics.
Terms related with evidence-based practice cluster were more frequent at the end of period 2000-2016, followed by some terms related with clusters of pain and health education. We did not observe relevant differences amongst research lines in terms of citation. The graphs can be seen in http://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.7054568
Conclusion(s): Our bibliometric visualisation approach makes possible to study the cognitive structure in physiotherapy. We identify that the citation impact of research lines is quite homogeneous, while their temporal evolution shows an alignment with the WCPT Policy Statement on Research with an increasing of evidence-based practice publications in the most recent years.
Implications: The approach proposed is very useful for improving the understanding of a complex research topic such as physiotherapy, which allows policy makers and researchers to identify new research directions and the discussion of research priorities.
Keywords: Bibliometrics, Physiotherapy, Research
Funding acknowledgements: This work was supported by the grant for predoctoral students “Estadías predoutorais de investigación Inditex-UDC 2017”.
Topic: Research methodology & knowledge translation; Research methodology & knowledge translation
Ethics approval required: No
Institution: None
Ethics committee: None
Reason not required: The nature of this bibliometric study doesn´t need ethics approval due to is not based in human research.
All authors, affiliations and abstracts have been published as submitted.
