[Evaluation of literature published about research on perinatal health carried out in Mexico, 1980-1988].

In this paper, the authors present an analysis of the quantity and quality of Mexican literature on perinatal health, corresponding to the period 1980-January 1989. The articles here analyzed were published in journals of the Index Medicus. First, the authors established the Mexican contribution to the international bibliographic production. After that, the articles were classified according to the subject under discussion. The relevance of these themes, in relation to the Mexican epidemiologic situation, is discussed. In second place, a preliminary evaluation of the quality of some of the national articles was done. With this purpose, a scoring system (including conceptual and methodological criteria) was elaborated. The authors concluded that Mexican scientific production on perinatal health is still very scanty and they observed that it diminished during the present decade. One possible reason for that is the reduction of the budget devoted to research and the scarcity of researchers salaries. The analysis by themes showed that the scientific production is spread out and that the subjects most frequently treated do not always correspond to the most important epidemiologic problems in Mexico. The evaluation of quality is considered by the authors as preliminary. Anyway, this first approach shows that most of the papers are based on research projects with a transversal design, without an explicit theoretical framework and focused on hospital settings. The authors conclude that the evaluation of the quantity of the scientific production contributes to research development. Perinatal health; analysis of research.