The publication of cardiology books in Spain. A bibliometric approach

We analyze Spanish production of cardiology books published in Spain and put together in the database ISBN between 1988 and 1997. For every book various things are considered: author, year of publication, ISBN classification, language, place published and publishers were analyzed. There are 565 books analyzed which are classified in the database under 27 different classes. The principal class is "General pathology. Clinical Medicine. Therapeutics", with 346 books. The places in which most books were published was Barcelona (46.90%) and Madrid (38.41%). The publishing houses were the ones which published more books (64.07%). 79.46 per cent of the books were originally written in Spanish, with at 20.54 per cent which were translated into by other languages. The ones that were translated were principally English (78.45%) and German (14.66%). These results confirm the tendency observed in other projects and indicate the increase of Spanish publications on cardiology, this is observed over the years. Although, in the years 1996 and 1997 we observe a slight decrease, that we will have to continue analysing with posterior studies to this one; to see if it is an isolated fact or a tendency to the diminution of the production of books published in our country, as a consequence of the evolution of works in other type of supports.