ABSTRACT
The social changes that Brazil has faced in the last years were accompanied by changes in medical education in such a way that it became a research object. Actually the initiatives to improve the human sources to work in health sciences education have led to an increase in the scientific output in medical education. Knowing the researchers' profile is important to understand medical education as a scientific field. Among us, in Brazil, their profiles could be inferred through the analyses of the main authors of articles published in the Brazilian Journal of Medical Education (RBEM) in the last ten years, because it is the national leading specialized journal in medical education. Therefore, in order to understand this field of investigation we performed a bibliometric study to characterize the main authors' profile of the RBEM from 2006 to 2015. We added all authors of scientific communications published in the period and we analyzed those with at least five publications. Their professional information was extracted from the Lattes Platform. Data were assessed descriptively. We identified 2,191 different authors and included thirty nine. Among the included authors, 64.1% are physicians and the others are psychologists, pedagogues, nurses and sociologists. The majority of authors (71.8%) completed graduation between 1970 and 1989. Almost 90% have a PhD degree and 46.2% acquired it in the 2000s. Forty one percent of the authors accomplished some specialization training in the field of education, mainly between 1990 and 2000. The majority of the authors (76.9%) are in the Southeast region of Brazil, especially in the state of São Paulo (48.7%). The mean interval from the first scientific publication to the first scientific publication in medical education was 22 years among the authors graduated in the 1970s. On the other hand, this interval decreased to 8.5 years for those graduated in the 1990s. We compared our data to other bibliometric data and to a historical perspective of Brazilian medical education in such a way that we can conclude that there is a consolidation of medical education as a research field with increasing specific professionalization of the interested investigators.
KEYWORDS
Bibliometrics; Education, Medical; Scientific Publication Indicators
