Abstract Context: Physiotherapy/ physical therapy practice, education, research and administration depend upon an evidencebased shared interpersonal decisionmaking process which in turn is based upon individual professional expertise and existing research evidence. The growing quantity and quality of research in evidenceinformed physical therapy dictated and essentitated a leading role by professional scholarly journals. Aims: This study aimed to perform a quantitative analysis of systematic reviews/ metaanalyses and randomized controlled trials in physiotherapy journals indexed in MEDLINE/ PubMed. Settings and Design: Systematic review of physical therapy journals. Methods and Material: Twelve Englishlanguage physical therapy journals[Physical Therapy (PTJ)/ Journal of American Physical Therapy Association (JAPTA), Physiotherapy (PT), Journal of Physiotherapy (JoP)/ Australian Journal of Physiotherapy (AJP), Journal of Physical Therapy Science (JPTS), Physical Therapy Reviews (PTR), Physiotherapy Theory and Practice (PTP), Physiotherapy Research International (PRI), Physiotherapy Canada (PC), Brazilian Journal of Physical Therapy (BJPT), Journal of Japanese Physical Therapy Association (JJPTA), and Progress in Physical Therapy (PPT)] were identified using advanced search,and they were searched for articles with filtersactivated for article typessystematic reviews, metaanalysis, and randomized controlled trials, on 27th March 2016. The overall and studyspecific and journalspecific reporting rates were computed descriptively using frequencies and percentiles in SPSS for Windows version 11.5. Results: The overall reporting rate among all journals was 4.38% for RCTs and 3.51% for SR/MAs respectively.PRI had the highest reporting rate for RCTs at 9.61% (57/593) followed by JoP/AJP at 7.79% (134/1720), and PTP at 7.69% (46/598). PRI also had the highest reporting rate for SR/MAs at 7.25% (43/593), followed by PTP at 7.02% (42/598) and BJPT at 5.74% (17/296). Conclusions: The overall reporting rate for high quality evidence in physical therapy journals was very low and there were only few randomized clinical trials and systematic reviews found. The study findings indicate a lack of adequate high quality evidence base in physical therapy literature published by physical therapy journals indexed in PubMed.
Keywords: EvidenceBased Physical Therapy; Research Evidence; Journal Reporting; Ppublication Trend.