Metric studies of information in medicine: a bibliometric analysis at Scopus database

Abstract

The scientific production in health sciences has historically stood out as a precursor to the development of the first studies that consolidated the use of scientific information sources in Brazil. This article analyzes the interdomain between metric studies of information and medicine. The field of medicine is chosen as representative of health sciences in the Scopus database, thus seeking to recognize this space of scientific production from productivity and collaboration indicators related to authors, journals and institutions. It characterizes the interdomain in a corpus of 132 articles by 28 researchers over a 28-year period. It presents the most productive authors, journals and institutions, as well as the co-authoring and co-citation relationships between authors and journals. It defines clusters of authors and journals, identifying the most representative of the analyzed interdomain. It qualifies articles according to their focus on three target groups of bibliometry, presented by Glänzel (2003), and identifies their research themes. It concludes that the most representative authors present studies focusing on the three target groups and that Scientometrics journal is the one that establishes the articulation of the studies that make up the interdomain in a more consistent way.