Top Physical & Rehabilitation Medicine journals
The leading journals in physical & rehabilitation medicine, ranked within their own field — not across all of science. The measure is computed from open data; how it works, and its limits, are set out in our method.
Scope: Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine (NLM Broad Subject Terms).
Grouped by quality band, best first, and listed alphabetically within each band — the bands are the ranking; we do not order named journals against one another.
- Disability and health journal
- Journal of neuroengineering and rehabilitation
- Scandinavian journal of occupational therapy
- IEEE transactions on neural systems and rehabilitation engineering : a publication of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society
- Neurorehabilitation and neural repair
- Australian occupational therapy journal
- Brazilian journal of physical therapy
- Canadian journal of occupational therapy. Revue canadienne d'ergothérapie
- European journal of physical and rehabilitation medicine
- Journal of neurologic physical therapy : JNPT
- Journal of occupational rehabilitation
- Journal of physiotherapy
- Physical therapy
- Quality of life research : an international journal of quality of life aspects of treatment, care and rehabilitation
- Annals of physical and rehabilitation medicine
- Archives of physical medicine and rehabilitation
- Clinical rehabilitation
- Disability and rehabilitation. Assistive technology
- Journal of cardiopulmonary rehabilitation and prevention
- Journal of geriatric physical therapy
- Journal of rehabilitation medicine
- Musculoskeletal science & practice
- Occupational therapy international
- Physical medicine and rehabilitation clinics of North America
- Physiotherapy
- Rehabilitation psychology
- The American journal of occupational therapy : official publication of the American Occupational Therapy Association
- American journal of physical medicine & rehabilitation
- Developmental neurorehabilitation
- Die Rehabilitation
- Disability and rehabilitation
- International journal of rehabilitation research. Internationale Zeitschrift für Rehabilitationsforschung. Revue internationale de recherches de réadaptation
- Journal of back and musculoskeletal rehabilitation
- Journal of bodywork and movement therapies
- Journal of hand therapy : official journal of the American Society of Hand Therapists
- Journal of pediatric rehabilitation medicine
- La Presse thermale et climatique
- Neuropsychological rehabilitation
- NeuroRehabilitation
- Occupational therapy in health care
- Pediatric physical therapy : the official publication of the Section on Pediatrics of the American Physical Therapy Association
- Physical & occupational therapy in pediatrics
- Physiotherapy research international : the journal for researchers and clinicians in physical therapy
- Physiotherapy theory and practice
- Rehabilitación
- Rehabilitation nursing : the official journal of the Association of Rehabilitation Nurses
- The Journal of manual & manipulative therapy
- The journal of spinal cord medicine
- Topics in stroke rehabilitation
- Voprosy kurortologii, fizioterapii, i lechebnoĭ fizicheskoĭ kultury
50 ranked journals. Computed 2026-09-04, citation window 2019–2022. Journals too new or too small to rank fairly are not listed — “unranked” is not a zero.
Questions
- How does this relate to physiotherapy and sports medicine?
- Physiotherapy and sports medicine overlap with rehabilitation but can fall under neighbouring NLM disciplines with their own lists. A journal is ranked in its home field, so some titles you associate with rehabilitation appear elsewhere.
- Does a higher band mean stronger evidence?
- No. The bands measure citation reach within the specialty, not the quality of any single study. Read the work and its methods, not just the masthead.
- How current is this ranking?
- It is recomputed about once a year over a multi-year citation window, and the calculation date is shown beneath the list. Recent, fast-moving work may not yet be reflected in citation counts.
Spotted an error?
If a journal looks misclassified — the wrong discipline, a missing title, a band that seems off — please tell us at [email protected]. Every report gets an answer, and a confirmed error is corrected at the latest when the ranking is next recomputed.
What this is not
- This ranks journals, not individual articles: it says nothing about the validity of any single paper.
- It is not medical advice and no substitute for clinical judgement or reading the work itself.
- The ranking is factual and method-based, computed the same way for every title. Like any method that ranks journals, though, it carries bias and is not a definitive judgement on a journal's quality or relevance — neither an endorsement nor a criticism of any journal or publisher.
See also the Physical & Rehabilitation Medicine literature digest — a daily email of new physical & rehabilitation medicine articles, filtered by these same quality bands.