A bibliometric analysis was completed of peer-reviewed literature
from 1991–2015, written by American occupational therapists,
to examine US high impact scholarship with “occupational therapy”
and “occupational therapist(s)” used as keywords to search
journal articles’publication title, abstract, author details, and keywords.
Results included 1,889 journal articles from 1991–2015 published
by American occupational therapists as first or corresponding
author. Sixty-nine articles attained a TotalCitation2015 50
and 151 attained a Citation2015 5 indicating that they were the
most highly cited literature produced in this period. Although the
majority (58%) of this literature was published in occupational
therapy-specific journals, 41% was published in interdisciplinary
journals. Results illustrate that the volume of highly cited American
occupational therapy peer-reviewed literature has grown
over the last two decades. There is need for the profession to
strategize methods to enhance the publication metrics of occupational
therapy-specific journals to reduce the loss of high quality
publications to external periodicals.
