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Letters and Responses |
Although the authors acknowledge that there were methodological limitations, we feel that these flaws compromised the accuracy of the data collected, and thus the productivity of the physical therapy programs identified is probably inaccurate. The specific methodological problems relate to capturing citations based on the requirement to have the terms "physical" and "therapy" in the institution field. This approach has 3 important limitations: (1) it includes citations of authors who are not also included as faculty members in the CAPTE database, (2) it did not identify programs that do not use the terms "physical" and "therapy" in their identification, and (3) it did not identify physical therapist authors whose affiliation is not indicated in the article.
As members of the Physical Therapy Program at the University at Buffalo (UB) (identified as the State University of New York at Buffalo in the manuscript), we would like to use our own situation as an example of the flaws in the data collection of this study. Our program was identified as being #2 in the total number of publications and #1 in the number of publications per faculty member. This is an overestimation of our productivity directly related to the methodological issues raised above. With respect to the first search strategy limitation we identified, our physical therapy program was a program in the Department of Physical Therapy, Exercise and Nutrition Science during the period of the search. We performed the searches of PubMed and CINAHL as published and identified 60 citations. Of these, 12 were from physical therapy faculty, whereas 48 were authored by our colleagues in the programs of Exercise Science and Nutrition. Because our colleagues in these other programs would not have been identified as faculty according to CAPTE, the report that we averaged 8 publications per faculty member is an overestimation.
Concerning the second limitation we raised about the search strategy, publications by UB physical therapy faculty would not have been identified at all if our current affiliation was used at that time (we are now a program in the Department of Rehabilitation Science).
Finally, the issue of not identifying articles by physical therapy faculty members if their affiliation was not in the article is important. The actual productivity for faculty in the UB Physical Therapy Program during the period studied was 30 articles. This number of articles yields 4.3 articles per faculty member, 50% lower than reported.
Richter and colleagues' conclusion that, between 1998 and 2002, only 11% of physical therapy programs published more than 20 articles might be true; however, we suspect that the productivity of many physical therapy programs is misrepresented as was ours. Based on the erroneous reporting of UB's productivity, we suggest that the publication productivity of the programs identified in this article, as well as the other numbers derived for performance measures, be viewed with caution, as they might actually be higher or lower than reported.
SE Bennett, PT, EdD, NCS, is Interim Program Director, Physical Therapy Program, Department of Rehabilitation Science, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY
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