Occupational Therapy Research Publications From 2001 to 2020 in PubMed: Trends and Comparative Analysis with Physiotherapy and Rehabilitation.

Only publications indexed in PubMed were counted. Several occupational therapy journals are not indexed there, and occupational therapy research published in education, social justice or other non-health journals falls outside PubMed's scope, so the occupational therapy totals are probably an undercount. The funding comparison stops at 2015 because a change in PubMed's indexing created an artificial drop in funded publications after that point. Only 'major' subject terms were used, so research that was about occupational therapy but not indexed as occupational therapy focused was excluded. The study counted publications and did not assess the quality of any of them. Indexation delays meant more recent years could not be included fairly, and the earliest years with residual numbers were dropped from the original 20-year window.

The authors declared no conflicts of interest and received no financial support for the research, authorship or publication of the article.

Do not read the small occupational therapy share as proof that little occupational therapy research exists. The authors' own limitation is that several occupational therapy journals and occupational therapy adjacent journals are not indexed in PubMed, so this counts only what PubMed holds. It also says nothing about the quality of any publication counted.