Frequency of citation and reputational assessment of contributors in physical therapy

This article describes a study designed to determine whether a correlation exists between those contributors whom practicing physical therapists consider to be eminent in the profession and those contributors with high citation frequencies in the current physical therapy literature. The study consisted of a citation analysis of a two-year period, 1981 and 1982, of the journals Physical Therapy and Physiotherapy Canada to identify the most frequently cited authors. Forty physical therapists practicing in two large general hospitals in Vancouver, Canada, volunteered to rate a random selection of contributors to the profession using a scale of 0 to 10 according to their apparent influence on the profession. Our study revealed that the scores of the therapists were correlated with the frequencies based on the citation analysis (p less than .05). We further observed that the citation frequency of authors in the Canadian journal was correlated with the citation frequency of authors in the American journal (p less than .05). We conclude that, with the increased emphasis on research in physical therapy, a stronger relationship will develop between subjective and objective measures of the professional impact of contributors on the profession.