Music Therapy Today (World Federation of Music Therapy): a bibliometric and content-analysis dataset, 2000–2023

This dataset accompanies the study "Three Decades of Music Therapy Today (2000–2023): A Bibliometric and Content Analysis of the Journal of the World Federation of Music Therapy." It provides a near-complete census of the retrievable output of Music Therapy Today (MTT; ISSN 1610-191X), the open-access journal of the World Federation of Music Therapy (WFMT), across the 14 volumes available between 2000 and 2023 (N = 1,070 published items). Because MTT is not indexed in Web of Science or Scopus, its 23-year, globally sourced record of the profession has been effectively invisible to citation-based bibliometrics; this dataset makes that record openly available and machine-readable. Each row is one published item (article, editorial, review, interview, commission report, or congress-proceedings contribution) coded on 29 variables spanning bibliographic identification, authorship and collaboration, geographic provenance, content (article type, document nature, topic and rule-based macro-theme, music-therapy method, age group, clinical population, setting) and methodology. Contents: the coded dataset (CSV + XLSX), the inter-coder reliability sub-study, the codebook, README and licence. Method: text extracted with PyMuPDF and coded by the research team; author country extracted from affiliation lines (≈96% national-level coding); inter-coder reliability on a random 15% sample (n = 160) blind-coded by three music therapists (Fleiss' κ = 0.78), with consensus resolution and harmonised vocabularies. Scope/limitations: Vols. 5, 8, 10, 17 unavailable; ~80% are congress-proceedings items; citation indicators not available (non-indexed journal). Privacy: only public bibliographic data; no human-subjects data; coders anonymised (Coder 1–3). License: CC BY 4.0.