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.