Evolution of physiotherapy scholarship: A comparative bibliometric analysis of two decades of English published work

Abstract

Objectives To undertake a bibliometric analysis of the physiotherapy literature at two points in time to identify similarities, differences, and the evolution of scholarship over a 40‐year time‐frame. Method To undertake a quantitative comparative analysis of the published and indexed scholarship literature contained within Scopus relating to physiotherapy over two 10‐year time windows—1978–1987 and 2008–2017. The method used, bibliometrics, is capable of identifying the nature of scholarship, the key actors, and how the focus and methods used to conduct studies have changed. A specialized bibliographic analysis and visualization tool VosViewer (University of Leiden) was used to analyse the extracted results. Results There has been a more than 10‐fold increase in the number of papers published across the two time‐frames (3,384 from the 1978 to 1987 period and 38,434 from 2008 to 2017). The focus of publication has moved from a medical disease orientated approach to one more specifically looking at physiotherapy interventions aimed at addressing functional ability. In addition, a more diverse range of research approaches are being used as well as efforts to synthesize findings across multiple studies using systematic reviews and meta‐analytical techniques. Authors now come from a much wider range of countries than they did 40 years ago, and they are more likely to be part of a large international collaborative research teams. Conclusions This unique and comprehensive analysis of physiotherapy scholarship across two different timeframes has provided important insights into the evolution of the profession, its changing focus and methodological approaches as well as the dramatic increase in activity, growth in research teams and diversity of country origins. For anyone entering the profession at this time, it provides a perspective on the pace of change they are likely to experience in their career ahead.

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Global Research Output on Sleep Research in Athletes from 1966 to 2019: A Bibliometric Analysis

“…The use of title search is common in bibliometric studies in contrast to the title-abstract-keywords search query [32][33][34]41]. The search strategy for the current study was informed by the methodology used in previous bibliometric analyses [28,31,34,41].…”

“…Further, examining author keywords and/or content analysis reveals current and future trends within a specific field [22,23,26,27]. The utilisation of bibliometric analyses are becoming increasingly common across a number of fields, including physiotherapy, human trafficking, road traffic injuries, m-health, nursing and midwifery and physical activity and sleep [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34]. Previous studies have attempted to catalogue the evolution of sleep research, sleep research in medicine and biology, and trends in sleep research through bibliometric techniques, but the existing evidence is more than a decade old [35][36][37].…”

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