Every day during September we will post up an idea for you to vote on. The most popular ideas will become the things that the inaugural Organizing Committee of the Critical Physiotherapy Network focuses on in 2015. So please make sure you cast your vote at the bottom of each post.
One of the first proper articles I wrote was about the birth of the physiotherapy profession in the UK and what the founders of the profession did to legitimize massage (Nicholls, 2006). The first place I sent it to was Physiotherapy – the English journal of the CSP, and the very organisation I was writing about. They rejected the paper, not because of its academic merits, but rather (or so they told me), because it was not evidence-based, and they only published ‘rigorous’ scientific papers. I ended up publishing it in Social Science and Medicine, but I always worried that physios wouldn’t find it there and so it would be lost to my target audience.
Publishing physio-related material in non-physio journals is a fact of life for the people in this group. You only have to look at the CVs of some of our most eminent scholars to see that they have published in a very eclectic range of journals. Of course, electronic searching now makes it much easier to find our work, but wouldn’t it be nice to have one place – one journal – that became the centrepiece for our research?
There is clearly enough research going on amongst us now to fill the pages of a journal and we have enough experience of publishing to know how to set our standards. So, isn’t it time we had a journal for critical thinking physiotherapists?
Post update: please note that voting closed on 7 October 2014 (results are available here), but please feel free to post your comments in the space below.
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