Where Occupational Therapy Students Find Data and Evidence for a Thesis in Canada (2026)

OTseeker and CINAHL are the two sources most occupational therapy students actually open first, and for different reasons: OTseeker for already-appraised intervention evidence, CINAHL for the breadth of allied-health literature your systematic search has to cover. Neither is sufficient alone, and neither is free of a real gap you should name in your methodology chapter rather than discover during your defence.

OTseeker: fast, but check the coverage gap yourself

OTseeker is a free, no-login database of critically appraised systematic reviews and randomised controlled trials specific to occupational therapy interventions, which makes it the fastest way to check whether a given intervention already has a strong evidence base before you build a thesis question around it. The database’s own site states plainly that content from 2016 onward is less comprehensive than in earlier years, and recommends supplementing a search there with PEDro (for physiotherapy-adjacent evidence) and PubMed for anything recent. Treat a clean OTseeker search as a starting point, not a complete systematic search, and say so explicitly in your methodology chapter’s search-strategy section — a supervisor who knows the database will ask about this gap if you do not address it first.

CINAHL: the broadest allied-health search, but only through your library

CINAHL indexes a wide range of nursing and allied-health journals relevant to occupational therapy practice, and is the database most Canadian OT programs expect students to search as part of a systematic or scoping review. It is not free to the public; almost every Canadian university library provides institutional access, which means it works seamlessly on campus or through your library’s remote-access login but is unavailable if you try to search it from a personal account without that access. Confirm your library’s specific CINAHL interface (EBSCO is the most common vendor) before you start building search strings, since export formats and field-search syntax differ slightly between library platforms.

PubMed, MEDLINE and Cochrane: free citations, gated full text

PubMed and MEDLINE are free and public, covering the biomedical and rehabilitation literature broadly rather than occupational therapy specifically, which makes them essential for a comprehensive systematic search but noisier than OTseeker or CJOT alone. The Cochrane Library, published by Wiley, gives free access to review abstracts and plain-language summaries, but the full systematic reviews typically sit behind the same university-subscription wall as most academic journals. A thesis search strategy that uses only OTseeker misses the volume a real systematic or scoping review needs; a strategy that uses only PubMed misses the OT-specific appraisal work OTseeker has already done. Most Canadian OT thesis committees expect at least CINAHL plus one of PubMed or OTseeker as the documented minimum.

CJOT: the Canadian-specific journal your search should not skip

The Canadian Journal of Occupational Therapy (CJOT), published in partnership with the Canadian Association of Occupational Therapists (CAOT), is the primary national peer-reviewed venue for Canadian OT practice, policy and outcomes research. Its publication volume is smaller than large international OT or rehabilitation journals, so a search of CJOT alone will not constitute a systematic review, but skipping it entirely in a Canada-focused thesis is a common reason a committee asks for a second search pass — Canadian practice-setting, funding-model and regulatory context rarely appear in the same depth in a US- or UK-based journal.

National data for framing the problem, not for intervention evidence

Three Canadian sources are useful for a different job than the literature databases above: framing why your topic matters, not finding intervention evidence. CIHI’s National Rehabilitation Reporting System (NRS) collects functional-status data, using the FIM instrument, from adult inpatient rehabilitation facilities across nine provinces, at admission, discharge, and optionally 80 to 180 days after discharge — useful as a national baseline for functional outcomes, but it covers rehabilitation broadly rather than occupational therapy as its own discipline, and it excludes community-based and pediatric OT settings entirely.

CIHI’s separate Health Workforce Database tracks the OT profession itself rather than patient outcomes: as of 2024, CIHI reports 12,233 occupational therapists employed in direct patient care in Canada, a 4.1% increase over the prior year, out of a total licensed supply of 21,963. The workforce skews young and female — 90.6% women, nearly two-thirds under age 45 — and CIHI publishes the underlying data by province/territory, employment setting and demographic breakdown through its Quick Stats tool and downloadable data tables, though Quebec is excluded from this particular dataset due to that province’s own data-submission limitations. This is the right source for a workforce-focused introduction or discussion section (supply, distribution, an ageing-population demand argument), not for comparing clinical outcomes, and it is worth noting explicitly in your limitations section if your thesis makes any Canada-wide claim, since a Quebec-shaped gap in the national picture is easy for a committee member familiar with the dataset to spot.

Statistics Canada’s Canadian Survey on Disability (CSD) provides free, publicly available population-level tables on disability prevalence and functional limitation, which is the right source for a problem-statement paragraph establishing scale, not for comparing intervention outcomes.

A realistic search strategy for an OT thesis

1. Start with OTseeker to see whether strong appraised evidence already exists for your intervention or population, noting the post-2016 coverage gap explicitly in your methodology chapter.
2. Run the full systematic search in CINAHL, through your university library, using the field-search syntax your specific library platform (usually EBSCO) supports, and export your results in a format your reference manager can import directly.
3. Cross-check in PubMed/MEDLINE for anything published outside allied-health-specific indexing, and in Cochrane for any relevant systematic review your CINAHL search might have missed.
4. Search CJOT specifically for Canadian practice-context findings a broader international search will not surface, even though its smaller volume means it cannot be your only source.
5. Use CIHI’s NRS, CIHI’s Health Workforce Database, or StatCan’s CSD only for population-, workforce- or system-level framing in your introduction and discussion, never as a substitute for intervention-level clinical evidence.

Document every database, the exact search string, and the date you ran it in your methodology chapter’s search-strategy table — a committee checking a systematic or scoping review claim will ask for this level of detail, and reconstructing it after the fact from memory is far slower than logging it as you go.

Managing what you find

A systematic search across five or six sources routinely returns several hundred results before deduplication, so import every export directly into a reference manager rather than tracking citations manually in a spreadsheet. Most Canadian university libraries provide free institutional access to Zotero, Mendeley or EndNote, and CINAHL, PubMed and Cochrane all support a direct RIS or BibTeX export your reference manager can read without retyping a single citation. Deduplicate before you start screening titles and abstracts — the same trial frequently appears in both CINAHL and PubMed, and counting it twice in your PRISMA-style flow diagram is an easy, avoidable error a careful reviewer will catch.

Turning a source list into a real search and a written chapter

None of the databases above write your literature review for you; they only tell you what exists. Once you have logged your search strings and pulled your results, the actual synthesis writing — grouping findings by theme, naming the gap your thesis fills — is where most students lose the most time. Tesify can help you turn a set of search results and notes into full literature-review prose you still review, edit, and take ownership of section by section; it does not run your search or submit anything in your name. Check Tesify’s own pricing page for current plans.

For where this search strategy feeds into your actual thesis chapters, how to write a literature review for a thesis covers the synthesis step in full, and where pharmacy students find data and sources is a useful parallel for another allied-health field’s own database landscape. If your OT thesis needs a validated outcome measure rather than a literature search, which mental health scale to use in a psychology thesis shows how a comparable field-specific instrument choice is made, and AI literature search tools for a Canadian thesis covers AI-assisted discovery tools like Elicit and Semantic Scholar that can sit alongside, not replace, the databases above.

Frequently asked questions

Is OTseeker free to use?

Yes. OTseeker is a free, publicly accessible database of critically appraised systematic reviews and randomised controlled trials in occupational therapy, with no login or subscription required.

Is CINAHL free for occupational therapy students?

Not on its own; CINAHL requires an institutional subscription. Almost every Canadian university library provides free access to enrolled students through the library’s own login or remote-access system.

Does OTseeker cover recent research?

Its own site states that coverage from 2016 onward is less comprehensive than earlier years, and recommends supplementing an OTseeker search with PEDro and PubMed for recent evidence.

What is the Canadian Journal of Occupational Therapy used for in a thesis?

CJOT is the main Canadian peer-reviewed venue for OT practice, policy and outcomes research, published in partnership with the Canadian Association of Occupational Therapists. It is useful for Canadian-specific practice context that a broader international search may miss, but its smaller publication volume means it cannot serve as your only source.

Can I use CIHI’s National Rehabilitation Reporting System for an occupational therapy thesis?

Yes, for national or provincial functional-outcome framing, but it covers adult inpatient rehabilitation broadly rather than occupational therapy specifically, and excludes community-based and pediatric OT settings entirely.

How many occupational therapists work in Canada?

CIHI reported 12,233 occupational therapists employed in direct patient care in Canada as of 2024, out of a total licensed supply of 21,963, with data available by province, employment setting and demographic group through CIHI’s Health Workforce Database (Quebec excluded due to that province’s own submission limitations).

How many databases should a systematic OT literature search use?

Most Canadian OT thesis committees expect at minimum CINAHL plus one of PubMed or OTseeker, documented with the exact search strings and search date. A search relying on a single database is rarely accepted as a systematic or scoping review.