Medical informatics across Europe: analysis of medical informatics scientific output in 33 European countries.

OBJECTIVES

To investigate the medical informatics scientific output in 33 European countries.

METHODS

Medical Subject Heading term "medical informatics" was used to identify all relevant articles published in 1998-2007 and indexed in the Medline database. The number of articles was adjusted to the population size of each included country in order to obtain the rates per million inhabitants.

RESULTS

A total of 28,604 articles were identified. The highest number per million inhabitants was found for Switzerland and the lowest for Albania. Overall, European Union member states had higher output than non-member states, gross domestic product was strongly associated with the scientific output in the field of medical informatics (r = 0.88, p < 0.001). While most countries had significant increase in the scientific output during the observed period, an adjustment to the European average output trend suggested that Lithuania, Portugal, Serbia and Spain had a greater increase than the rest of Europe.

CONCLUSION

The results suggest large disparities across Europe. Further development of medical informatics as a profession and a clear recognition of the discipline are needed to reduce these disparities and propel further increase in research productivity.