Mapping the literature of health care management.
OBJECTIVE
The research provides an overview of the health care management literature and the indexing coverage of core journal literature.


METHODS
Citations from five source journals for the years 2002 through 2004 were studied using the protocols of the Mapping the Literature of Allied Health Project and Mapping the Literature of Nursing Project. The productivity of cited journals was analyzed by applying Bradford's Law of Scattering.


RESULTS
Journals were the most frequently cited format, followed by books. Only 3.2% of the cited journal titles from all 5 source journals generated two-thirds of the cited titles. When only the health care management practitioner-oriented source journals were considered, two-thirds of the output of cited journal titles came from 10.8% of the titles. Science Citation Index and PubMed provided the best overall coverage of the titles cited by all 5 source journals, while the cited titles from the 2 practitioner-oriented journals were covered most completely by Social Sciences Citation Index and Business Source Complete.


CONCLUSIONS
Health care management is a multidisciplinary field. Librarians must consider the needs of their users and assist them by providing the necessary materials and combination of indexes to access this field adequately.
Taylor
Mary K
MK
Library Affairs, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Morris Library, Carbondale, IL 62901, USA. mtaylor@lib.siu.edu
Gebremichael
Meseret D
MD
Wagner
Catherine E
CE
D000043:Abstracting and Indexing; D015706:Bibliometrics; D001877:Books; D016206:Databases, Bibliographic / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D003695:Delivery of Health Care / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006298:Health Services Administration; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D010506:Periodicals as Topic