• Amorin-Woods L
• Parkin-Smith G
• Woods B
• Adams J

• Chiropractic / Australia
• Chiropractic Research
• Open Access Document

Objective: The chiropractic profession faces many challenges to establish credibility including for the management of spinal disorders representing the core of its current healthcare market share. The ability and proclivity of the profession to conduct and translate research into practice is increasingly important. Beliefs, perspectives, barriers, and attitudes toward research may affect engagement, capacity, funding secured, and output of research on chiropractic topics.

Method: We used an online questionnaire to investigate perspectives toward, capacity and output and barriers to research publication among Australian practicing chiropractors and academics.

Results: Academics and practitioners agreed that it was the responsibility of professional organizations to fund research (p=0.47, 0.56) as opposed to other organizations such as universities with chiropractic undergraduate programs. Surprisingly, practicing chiropractors, as a collective, had a higher research publication output annually in profession-specific peer-reviewed journals than chiropractic academics (p<0.05) over the same time period.

Conclusion: This study has offered thought-provoking results able to inform research activities and priorities. Further definitive investigations exploring research within the chiropractic profession in Australia are feasible, the results of which may invigorate research activities and strategies. We offer recommendations regarding future research activities, some offering reconciliation of the differing research priorities across factions within the chiropractic profession.

Limitations: In the absence of pre-existing, validated questionnaires, we generated a bespoke questionnaire that offers insights into research activity rather than definitive generalizable results. The data is based on participant self-reports, rather than a quantitative determination of research output by impact factor or citations, so responses may have a self-reporting bias. Research output was measured in strata rather than exact numbers, offering a broad impression of research activities and opinions.

Author keywords: Chiropractic Research; Cross-Sectional Research; Public Health; Research Priorities; Research Agendas

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