The professional network underlying cerebral palsy intervention research based on systematic reviews and meta-analyses published in international journals: authors’ communities, institutional networks, and international collaboration()

Cerebral palsy (CP) is a well-researched area of medical science, health science and special education. The growing number of publications every year makes difficult to monitor the progress of this research domain, therefore there is a broad interest for conducting systematic reviews and meta-analyses of interventions in international peer-reviewed scientific journals. Our goal is to analyze the scientific activity of authors who published systematic reviews and meta-analyses of CP intervention studies. To identify the active researchers, institutions, and countries, we used scientometric and bibliometric indicators that assess their productivity, collaborations, and the citations (utilization/usefulness of their studies), also paying attention to the institutional background and the network structure of national and international collaboration. We used Scopus to search for articles and included systematic reviews and meta-analyses of intervention studies, a total of 180 works, in our sample. Our results showed active and large communities of prolific authors and groups of authors with diverse institutional background. Most institutions are universities, hospitals, but we found various other organizations among them. Most of the universities are leading educational institutions according to international rankings; some of them are among the top-ranking ones. In geographical terms, the North American, Australian, and European regions are the most active and most interconnected ones. We assume organizations other than scientific collaboration networks also play a major role in the productivity and dissemination of scientific knowledge in this research area. As an example, we could mention the network, including the US, Australian and European registers. Authors living and working in the Far East, the Middle East or in South America also started to publish relevant articles in the 2010s. The research network structuring scientific knowledge in this area is flourishing.