Presentation of the Prehospital Emergency Research Network and an analysis of bibliometric indicators for scientific productivity in out-of-hospital care.

Through research we advance scientific understanding and its application in medical practice. Many of the advances in out-of-hospital emergency care are extracted from hospital settings, perhaps because of the difficulties inherent to our prehospital environments: heterogeneity, obstacles to data collection, biases not controlled for, among other limitations. Research networks offer opportunities to create connections among researchers and facilitate homogeneous data collection. We introduce the Prehospital Emergency Research Network (whose Spanish acronym is RINVEMER) and analyze bibliometric indicators of Spanish productivity in this specialty. Since 1975, a total of 512 articles have been published in journals with impact factors by 381 authors working in Spanish prehospital settings. The first such article published after the creation of the Web of Science appeared in 1999. The 61 authors affiliated with the emergency health services of Andalusia, a public company, made up the largest single author group. Publication productivity increased substantially in the last 2 years. A total of 63 PhD theses have been registered in this specialty - 8 of them at the University of Oviedo. With the growth of Spanish out-of-hospital research in recent years, we expect the creation of the RINVEMER network to improve collaboration among our researchers.