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Publication
Understanding the landscape of technology in the physiotherapy education: a descriptive analysis through bibliometrics
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| 1.13 MB | Adobe PDF |
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Abstract(s)
Background: The usage of technology, in Physiotherapy practice and education, is still growing, with a possible impact also on research. However, the increase of the number of scientific publications make it difficult to know the scientific structure and development of a field. Visualization techniques based on bibliometric data are useful for the understanding of scientific fields. Methods: This is a bibliometric, descriptive and retrospective study. We identified publications from Web of Science and Pubmed databases related to technology in physiotherapy education. From the titles and abstracts of these publications, authors selected the main terms related to the field, extracted by VOSviewer software, to create a visualization of the most important topics studied in the literature. Results: A total of 137 publications were identified in WOS and 648 in Pubmed. After clusterization of the two groups of terms, we could identify that, in the case of Pubmed, the main associations with technology seem to be its use in the context of teaching/learning of the intervention in Physiotherapy, use as a tool to facilitate the patient education, for the prescription and implementation of exercise programs and its use for use in the various stages of the Physiotherapy process. In relation to WOS database we could identify similar patterns with topics like teaching/learning of the intervention in Physiotherapy and Physiotherapy process, but also a big emphasis in the association between the topics Education and Technology. In both databases we could see that this is a recent topic, starting in Pubmed after 2006. Discussion: In both databases the scope of the analysis revealed different topics covered by Pubmed and WOS databases. This is related to their coverage and suggests the need for using more than only one. Their distinct features make it impossible to compare other characteristics of the field as main productive countries or institutions. Conclusion: In our search, although WOS and Pubmed have different topic coverage, most of them are related to use of technology applied to the context of intervention (including several steps of the Physiotherapy Process) but also in the education of students and patients.