Mapping the Literature of Occupational Therapy

The selection of journals in occupational therapy was based on breadth of coverage of the field in general as opposed to publication in a specific or narrow aspect such as pediatrics, mental health, or geriatrics. The intent was to provide a cross section of the literature referenced in occupational therapy while avoiding, if possible, skewing the cited references in any particular area of practice within the field. Therefore, three journals were selected that met the criteria of publishing across the field in practice, education, and research. All three are listed, along with three specialty journals and one news weekly, on the Brandon/Hill "Selected List of Books and Journals in Allied Health". Titles included the American Journal of Occupational therapy (AJOT), published by the American Occupational therapy Association; the Occupational therapy Journal of Research (OTJR), published by the American Occupational therapy Foundation; and Occupational therapy in Health Care (OTHC), published by the Haworth Press.

All cited references from the three journals were included for the years 1995 and 1996. Only references from articles were included. Excluded were references given in editorials and letters to the editor. A database was created to provide a numeric code for each cited item in the reference list, the type of format such as book or journal, the title of the reference source, and the year of publication. For journal citations, the specific journal title cited was also recorded. Many types of cited references were identified in addition to books and journals. Other cited items included archive materials, audiovisuals, dissertations and theses, federal and state government documents, newsletters, newspapers, pamphlets, papers presented at conferences or workshops, policies and procedures of AOTA, surveys used in research studies, tests used for clinical assessment, and unpublished manuals or booklets used in workshops. Although the data from these sources was analyzed, they have been grouped together as "Miscellaneous" in the summary tables. After all cited items were categorized, the cited journal titles were arranged in rank order based on the frequency of occurrence. Bradford's Law of Scattering was applied by dividing the ranked list into three equal zones based on the number of citations. Zone 1 represented the core journal literature in occupational therapy. Zone 2 represented joumals that were frequent sources of information, while Zone 3 represented the group of greatest dispersion and the least productive sources of information. For Zones 1 and 2, the joumal titles were then checked against three databases to discem whether the joumal was included. The lists of joumals indexed from MEDLINE, the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), and PsycINFO were examined. Joumals that changed title names or ceased publication before 1996 were noted with the continuing title or the date the publication stopped.

Occupational therapy draws upon a large field of information and borrows from several other subject areas. In addition to the medical journals, physical therapy, nursing, psychology, rehabilitation, and education joumals appear in the Zone 1 and 2 journal list. Using any single database means potentially useful information is likely to be overlooked. The study shows clearly that the profession of occupational therapy, in the United States, relies primarily on the AJOT as a source of information and cited references. Whether such reliance is justified because the journal represents the best the profession has to offer, or whether the reliance is due to the availability of bibliographic control cannot be determined by this tudy. Another contributing factor may be the relative ease of access by many practitioners and researchers since the AJOT is a benefit of membership to the American Occupational therapy Association. All other journals require a separate subscription. Because of the dominance of the AJOT, both in indexing and in cited references, the potential role of other nationwide journals of occupational therapy such as the Canadian, British, and Australian ones, is unclear.