MEDIEAL ETHICS: Research Themes and Intellectual Base

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to reflect the intellectual structure of the research field in medical ethics. Central research themes of both citing and cited doiuments were found to focus on issues concerning autonomy, ethics education, principles of ethics, medical research and life-death decisions. An additional number of themes with delimited foci were also identified. On the basis of the findings it was concluded that the objective of describing the intellectual structure of medical ethics was notreachedin terms of completenessT. he data consistedo f 477 bibliographic descriptionso f publications of Jourhal of Medical Ethics fuomthe period I993-2OOL and the bibiiometric methods used were cocitation analysis and bibliographic coupling. Additional bibliometric applications identified and extracted documents in the sample with a citation relationship to the same and analysed the co-occurrence of descriptor terms. General statistical techniques applied were multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis.

Keywords: Bibliometrics; bibliogrtphic coupling; citation analysis; cocitation analysis ; medicai ethics