Open access and the British Journal of Occupational Therapy

Current electronic journals on occupational therapy: A descriptive study

Introduction: The quantity and quality of papers published in journals are often considered as research trends indicators in several fields of study. In the case of occupational therapy (OT) there are few studies addressing this issue.Objective: To describe the characteristics of occupational therapy electronic journals, including year of creation, publication frequency, peer review process, language of publication, and content access policies. Materials and methods: A descriptive, quantitative study was carried out based on a search conducted in the following databases by using the term “occupational therapy”: Web of Science, Scopus, SciELO, CINAHL, OTDBASE, Ulrich’s International Periodical Directory, NCBI Databases, CINAHL-EBSCOhost, ProQuest, Medline, and Directory of Open Access Journals. Simple descriptive statistics was used to analyze data. Results: After the search was conducted, 39 journals were included for analysis, of these 85% had been created after 1990. All journals were indexed in different databases, but most of them were in Journal Citation Reports, CINAHL, Medline, Science Citation Index Expanded, OTDBase, and PsycINFO. Likewise, approximately 36% publish an issue every three months, and mainly in English. Conclusion: A more comprehensive understanding of the characteristics of these journals may help OT researchers choosing the best option to submit their works for publication, and contribute to achieving higher rates of production and dissemination of knowledge on OT by said journals.