[Contribution of Galician hospitals to national and international Internal Medicine scientific meetings].
OBJECTIVE
To evaluate the scientific contributions of internal medicine services from Galicia to nationals and internationals specialty meetings and to describe theirs preferences in clinical research.


METHODS
We analysed the communications from the Abstracts books of the last four Spanish Internal Medicine National Congress (1994-2000 period) in comparison with that of 1984, the last two European Congress (1999 and 2001) and the last World Congress (2000). Case reports were excluded.


RESULTS
An increasing number of communicating hospitals and a sustained number of reports was observed with a minimum of 2 hospitals (1984) to a maximum of 12 (1996) with 5-6 hospitals on average. Number of communications became stable and reached 5% of the whole spanish reports. Cardiovascular and AIDS-Infectious diseases were the preferred research fields.


CONCLUSIONS
An increment of scientific communications from a growing number of galician hospitals was observed. This scientific production became continuous and stabilized notoriously on cardiovascular and AIDS-infectious disease fields.
Montes Santiago
J
J
Servicio de Medicina Interna, Hospital Meixoeiro, 36200 Vigo, Pontevedra. julio.montes.santiago@sergas.es
Pérez Alvarez
R
R
D015706:Bibliometrics; D003226:Congresses as Topic / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D016206:Databases, Bibliographic / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006761:Hospitals / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D007388:Internal Medicine; D010506:Periodicals as Topic; D012106:Research / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D013030:Spain