SaveYourself.ca • Sensible advice for aches, pains & injuries
 

published 10/04/10

Top journals for pain and injury science

Medical journals that every physiotherapist, chiropractor, and massage therapist should be paying attention to

by Paul Ingraham, Vancouver, Canada BIO
Credentials & qualifications. I am a science journalist, and I was a massage therapist for ten years. I’m close to the end of a Health Sciences degree — 2 courses left! — and I am on the editorial team of Science-Based Medicine. I have spent many years studying therapy science, and my work is greatly enriched by thousands of conversations with readers and experts from around the world. I make a living from this website, selling some of my most detailed tutorials as ebooks. For more, see Who Am I to Say?

Which journals publish the most and best randomized controlled trials of physical therapy treatments? I wish I’d had this information a decade ago.

From the Department of Now You Tell Me, the journal Physical Therapy recently published an extremely useful set of reading recommendations for geeky, science-loving manual therapists. Costa et al ranked journals by a variety of criteria, such as the sheer volume of relevant content and the prestige of the journal (“impact factor”). Using their lists of the top five for each category, it was easy for me to compile my own customized top ten list: I mashed up their various rankings into a single score, and then tweaked it to give greater weight to experimental quality and subject matter, which is of the greatest interest to me, my readers, and most manual therapists.

The winners are …

  1. Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation
  2. Pain
  3. Physical Therapy
  4. Stroke
  5. Clinical Rehabilitation
  6. Spine
  7. Lancet
  8. British Medical Journal
  9. Journal of the American Medical Association

And the number one journal to read …

  1. Journal of Physiotherapy

Words of wisdom from the Physical Therapy article:

Physical therapists who are trying to keep up-to-date by reading the best available evidence on the effects of physical therapy interventions have to read more broadly than just physical therapy-specific journals. Readers of articles on physical therapy trials should be aware that high-quality trials are not necessarily published in journals with high impact factors.