Background: Journals are essential resources providing updated scientific information for evidence-informed decision-making and their role is very crucial in a multidisciplinary field such as Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (PMR).
Objective: To assimilate the studies analyzing rehabilitation journals and provide an evidence-informed update on their role in evidence-based rehabilitation.
Methodology: A systematic review through electronic search using key terms including 'rehabilitation and journals' in title of articles was performed in three databases: PubMed, CINAHL and Google scholar to obtain relevant citations which were scrutinized at 'title-abstract-full text' levels and the final list of articles were extracted for their content to provide a descriptive summary depending upon individual studies' objectives.
Results: There were studies analyzing PMR journals' network-based characteristics (two studies), bibliographic coverage, levels of evidence (three studies), impact factor, bibliometric indicators, referencing accuracy, quality of intervention studies and Japanese contribution.
Conclusion: The substandard/suboptimal level of reporting of rehabilitation journals was comparable to other medical specialties and related professional disciplines.
Implications of the Study: There is an urgent need to explore methodological quality of reporting systematic reviews and randomized controlled trials, ethical issues, content analysis, statistical methods and conflicts of interest among rehabilitation journals.
Key words: Evidence-based rehabilitation, Evidence analysis, Research trend, Journal contribution, Publication analysis
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