Evaluation of books as research outputs in history of medicine

Lists of books about the history of medicine were compiled from book reviews and from the references in papers in the subject taken from the Social Sciences Citation Index. The authors' addresses were sought from papers in this database and thereby some of the books could be attributed to individual countries, such as the UK and the USA, which were to be compared. Counts of citations and of reviews to individual books both showed that the UK was a very strong performer in this subject, and that its standing relatively had increased over the last few decades. This judgement reinforced the results of interviews carried out overseas with senior historians of medicine and gave them extra credibility. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.