REHABILITATION - THE CINDERELLA OF NEUROLOGICAL RESEARCH - A BIBLIOMETRIC STUDY

Rehabilitation is under-represented in the neurological literature on disabling diseases. A Medline search was conducted to retrieve the art icles published between January 1991 and June 1994 under the main head ings of Stroke, Parkinson's disease, Multiple sclerosis, Brain injury, Ataxia and Dementia. These were then combined with the sub-heading Re habilitation The former search yielded 27724 articles, the latter 1272 (4.6%), In 1992, the Journal of Citation Reports (JCR) assigned to Jo urnals publishing rehabilitation papers an average Impact Factor (IF) of 0.7-2.8 (median 1.8): that is, 31-90% (depending on the various mai n headings, median 68%) of the average IF given to Journals publishing non-rehabilitation papers, In the present study, the weight of the li terature was defined as the product of the number of articles multipli ed by the IF of the corresponding Journal (IF = 0 for non-JCR Journals ), Across the various neurologic conditions, the weight of the Rehab l iterature was 0.1-7% (median 2%) of the weight of the non-Rehab litera ture, The results suggest that neurology is still reluctant to face th e disability challenge.