title: Evolution of medical informatics in bibliographic databases.
abstract: Medical informatics became a medical specialty during the last years and this is evidenced by a great amount of journal articles regarding the subject published worldwide. We compared the presentation of Medical Informatics in two different bibliographic databases: MEDLINE and LILACS (Latin American and Caribbean Literature on the Health Sciences). Previous studies described how Medical Informatics was represented in MEDLINE, but we wanted to compare it to a regional database as LILACS. We search both databases completely (MEDLINE 1966 -2002 and LILACS 1982-2002) using the keyword "Medical Informatics" as MeSH term in MEDLINE and as DeCS term in LILACS, and we added "medical informatics" as text word and analyzed the references obtained as results. We found that MEDLINE properly represents the impact of Medical Informatics in non-Latin-American international journals, but lacks of a considerable amount of articles from this region, while LILACS, although in comparison it is smaller in size, has more articles regarding the subject. So we think that LILACS properly represents the specialty in Latin America and the Caribbean Region.
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Informatics, Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina. paula.otero@hospitalitaliano.org.ar
authors.forename: Paula
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Otero
authors.forename: Federico
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Pedernera
authors.forename: Sergio
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Montenegro
authors.forename: Damian
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Borbolla
authors.forename: Sebastián
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Garcia Marti
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Luna
authors.forename: Fernan Gonzalez Bernaldo
authors.initials: FG
authors.lastname: de Quiros
mesh_terms: D015706:Bibliometrics; D017691:Caribbean Region; D016206:Databases, Bibliographic; D007843:Latin America; D016239:MEDLINE; D008490:Medical Informatics; D046650:Medical Subject Headings; D010506:Periodicals as Topic; D013358:Subject Headings