[The development of public health research]

The overall assessment of the public health research (PHR) development in Mexico is a previous condition to promote PHR at a national scale. This assessment has been delayed because standard PHR identification criteria within the health research field have been missing. In this paper the guidelines to determine the PHR fields of application are presented, as well as the bibliometric indices to determine its current stage of development; a PHR methodological classification scheme is also proposed. To estimate the PHR production in Mexico, the above criteria were used to analyze the content of a data base created from two national data bases (Biblat and Periódica), and from one international data base on biomedical literature (Medline); a manual search was implemented to identify studies missing studies in the data bases but published in Salud Pública de México, the most prominent national journal in this field. The review period in Medline extended from 1979 to 1986. About 2,269,905 international scientific references were recorded, 5,189 of which belonged to national authors. Approximately 180,000 papers were related to the PHR; in 552 of these works, the main author was from Mexico. After adding up to this figure, the number of articles found in the manual search and after correcting for any misclassification error, the PHR data base contained 971 papers; approximately half of them were not investigation reports, but commentaries, reviews and position papers. Outbreak studies were 3 per cent and mortality 2.2 per cent; prevalence works were the most common (8.4%), but analytic studies were very infrequent (4%). Communicable diseases, noncommunicable diseases and mental health ranked among the main topics of interest; all other topics were infrequent or absent. These results highlight the need to carry out four main tasks to promote nationally the PHR in the short term.