Worldwide identification of top research actors -institutions and countries- in physiotherapy.

Presentation in the World Confederation for Physical Therapy Congress. Geneva. 2019 BACKGROUND: Scientific production in physiotherapy has significantly increased in recent years. It is important to identify the main institutions and countries that are actively contributing to the discipline, together with their activity across different research lines. PURPOSE: To identify scientifically active countries and institutions in the discipline of physiotherapy. To analyse and compare their scientific output and normalised citation impact. To study the thematic specialisation of countries. METHODS: This is a bibliometric, descriptive and retrospective study. We identified Web of Science publications from the field of physiotherapy in the period 2000-2015 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 discipline of physiotherapy. Authors used the Leiden Ranking Database to identify institutions and countries contributing to the physiotherapy publications previously identified. We calculated bibliometric indicators of production and citation impact (normalised indicators), based on the in-house version of the Web of Science database, available at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (Leiden University). We analysed the thematic specialisation of countries by means of visualisations using VOSviewer software. For this purpose, we used the eight different research lines identified in a previous study: 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 and psychometrics. RESULTS: We identified 89 countries and 1744 institutions active with more than 5 publications in our set. The most 5 productive countries in physiotherapy are (decreasing order): United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Germany. The most 5 productive institutions are University of Toronto, VU University of Amsterdam, University of Sidney, University of Queensland and University of Melbourne. The scientific production from The Netherlands has the highest average citation impact. Some countries are highly specialised in one or two research lines, like Germany or Japan, while countries like the United States and Canada are more evenly spread across most research lines. Australia and The Netherlands exhibit a large production of publications on evidence-based practice. Main graphs can be seen in 10.6084/m9.figshare.7055117 CONCLUSIONS: Most productive countries are not always related to high average citation impact, which suggests that the mere measurement of output is not enough to identify high impact performance in research. The level of thematic specialisation of countries is different across countries. IMPLICATIONS: To know the current situation and the main actors of research development in physiotherapy allows us to recognize its leading countries and institutions. That provides policy makers with information to support research policies oriented towards the promotion of research and the creation of collaboration networks of specialisation