Comparing structural perspectives on Medical Informatics: EMBASE vs. MEDLINE.
Previous bibliometric analyses of Medical Informatics' internal structure used MEDLINE records as the unit of study. EMBASE, a product of Excerpta Medica, carries a wider international scope and offers complementary retrieval results to MEDLINE. Since much medical informatics critical thinking originated abroad and migrated to North America, this difference in coverage may also indicate a different perspective of "what constitutes medical informatics." Using traditional bibliometric and multivariate data analysis techniques, the present work examines EMBASE indexing records for the same 1995-1999 time frame as earlier MEDLINE studies to identify and compare structural features of the field.
Morris
Theodore Allan
TA
Kent State University, School of Library and Information Science, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.
D000043:Abstracting and Indexing; D015706:Bibliometrics; D016206:Databases, Bibliographic; D016239:MEDLINE; D008490:Medical Informatics; D015999:Multivariate Analysis; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled