State of the Journal,2011

Practice Areas

Most studies over the past 4 years have addressed two primary practice areas: (1) rehabilitation, disability, and participation and (2) children and youth. Research addressing productive aging, mental health, and work and industry has consistently been lacking. The dearth of research in these practice areas has become particularly problematic as the profession increasingly competes for service reimbursement with professionals who are producing research evidence supporting their own services in domains traditionally considered to fall within occupational therapy (Padilla, 2011b; Snodgrass, 2011b; Wolf, 2011). Similarly, as the U.S. population ages, we have not produced sufficient research demonstrating the profession’s contribution to productive aging, and we risk losing our status as approved providers of services designed to maintain the health and quality of life of older adults—a situation that may parallel our lost status as approved providers of mental health services in many states. Research articles in 2010 and 2011 began to break this trend with the publication of special issues addressing driving safety and mobility in elderly clients and the effectiveness of occupational therapy services for clients with Alzheimer’s disease, mental health disabilities, and work-related injuries (Tables 2 and 3).

Research Type

A similar imbalance can be seen in the types of research published in the journal. The number of studies examining intervention effectiveness has steadily increased, with a large peak in 2011 (see Tables 2 and 3), and basic research, which has tended to examine general disability experiences rather than occupational therapy practice questions, has declined in comparison. Research establishing the psychometric properties of occupational therapy instruments has remained strong, and the rigor of experimental design, demonstrated by level of evidence (based on the American Occupational Therapy Association [AOTA] Evidence-Based Practice Project; Lieberman & Scheer, 2002), has steadily increased (see Tables 2 and 3). The profession has not made sufficient advances, however, in the examination of practice efficiency—research that examines whether a specific intervention is safe and cost and time efficient and whether it promotes patient adherence and satisfaction.

To compete with fellow health care professionals encroaching on the profession’s practice domain and to maintain (and regain) our status as approved providers in traditional and newly emerging practice areas, it is imperative that the profession increase its efforts in the following three areas: (1) generating more research in the practice areas of productive aging, mental health, and work and industry; (2) examining intervention effectiveness and efficiency across all practice areas; and (3) producing research with high levels of experimental rigor that can be more meaningfully interpreted and generalized.

Impact Factor

AJOT’s impact factor (IF) score has steadily increased in the past 4 years. The IF reflects the number of times published articles are cited in other articles and thus is an indicator of a journal’s influence in the field. After maintaining an average 2-year score of 0.641 from 1999 to 2007, AJOT’s IF showed a large increase beginning in 2008. AJOT, the Australian Occupational Therapy Journal (AOTJ), the Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy, and the Occupational Therapy Journal of Research are currently the only occupational therapy journals that have IF scores. When authors of articles published in these journals cite each other’s work, the IF for all four journals can increase. AJOT’s increasing IF score may reflect the larger number of articles published in each volume, the shorter acceptance-to-publication time (i.e., research is disseminated and cited more quickly), and the increasing quality of research articles published (Table 4).

Research Funding

Research funding is one indication of the scientific community’s acknowledgment of occupational therapy research contributions. Table 5 provides funding source data for research articles published in AJOT from 2009 to 2011. Although the percentage of funded research in each year has remained relatively constant, the percentage of studies receiving National Institutes of Health (NIH), other federal, or U.S. foundation funding peaked in 2011. The joint American Occupational Therapy Foundation (AOTF) and AOTA research agenda (AOTF & AOTA, n.d.) can guide occupational therapy researchers in aligning their own research trajectories with those of the NIH, other federal funders, and foundation funders (see Table 5).

Future Goals

Over the past 4 years, AJOT has advanced in the following five ways: (1) The number of research studies with higher levels of experimental rigor has increased; (2) the number of research studies addressing intervention effectiveness has increased; (3) more research has addressed the practice areas of productive aging, mental health, and work and industry; (4) the IF steadily increased after remaining stagnant for almost a decade; and (5) the number of published articles per volume has increased, allowing more occupational therapy researchers to be published in the journal. To maintain and further expand these advances, the following goals will be pursued: