Editorial

摘要

When I was asked if I would write an editorial about professional journals and databases,?I went to the dictionary to look up the exact meaning of ‘editorial’. It means a writing?of opinions based on a topic. As I have 52 years of occupational therapy experience as a?clinician, an educator and developer of OTDBASE, I have opinions based on my experience.The development of OTDBASE came from my own experience and needs. Initially, as?a student, I learned from my teachers’ lectures and medical textbooks, with rare references?to our professional journal, the Canadian Journal of Occupational Therapy (CJOT). While?working in a relatively isolated area of western Canada, I managed to have access to both?CJOT and the American Journal of Occupational Therapy (AJOT), at that time consideredto be the ‘best’ occupational therapy journal. Ten years later, while doing graduate work at?the University of British Columbia, I spent hundreds of hours researching the history of?the development of occupational therapy in Canada. Because this was the pre?computer?and pre?database era, those hours were spent looking for information that no one could?tell me if it even existed.I began teaching occupational therapy in 1971, and was very aware that students still?had to spend hundreds of hours in the library looking for information they hoped existed.?In the 1970’s, personal computers became available to libraries and individuals. By the?time I had my third personal computer and learned a little about what a database was, it?occurred to me that perhaps this machine and I could create a special database program?which could shorten the time needed to find wanted occupational therapy journal articles.Rather than ‘re?inventing the wheel’, I consulted with the university librarian to see?what databases already existed that contained occupational therapy journals. We lookedfor 8 of the most available occupational therapy journals and found them in 42 different?databases, but there was no one database that contained all 8 journals. I felt then thatthe creation of a database containing only occupational therapy journals would fill a?need, not only for clinicians and educators, but especially for students who could findout quickly if there were (or, even more importantly, were not) journal articles available?on any occupational therapy topic.The creation of OTDBASE in 1986 required me to type in thousands of abstracts as?scanners were in their preliminary stage of development. The development of personal ?computer scanners in the early ‘90s made it easier to increase the number of journals and?their abstracts in OTDBASE.Occupational therapy journals play a vital role in the development of our profession.?They reflect the interests of a community, allow communication within that community,stimulate new thinking, challenge practice and advance professional knowledge. Reading?journals for inclusion in OTDBASE, especially relatively new journals from newly developing occupational therapy countries, tended to show me that there was a certain anxiety about creating what is felt to be a new profession. On the other hand, journals from countries with well?developed occupational therapy professions show a gradual development over the years from communication and descriptive content to the development of theory, research and practice.Because I was in contact with a number of countries with newly developing occupational therapy profession, I wondered, if asked, which existing journals I could recommend as being most helpful to their professional development. I could only answer that question if I examined which occupational therapy journals were most referenced in other occupational therapy journals. My 2006 and 2007 personal research findings that the three journals most referenced by others, and thus in my opinion professionally valued, were the American Journal of Occupational Therapy, the Occupational Therapy Journal of Research: Occupation, Participation and Health,