![]() ![]() In this study, an article is defined as any document with a digital object identifier (DOI), a system that assigns a unique identifier to academic publications. To enable this computational analysis, we constructed a database of nearly all articles ever published in JAMA and NEJM. In this manuscript, leveraging a dataset of nearly half-a-million articles published in JAMA and NEJM over the past 200 years, we demonstrate the kinds of analyses that are now possible and that can provide valuable insight into the history of medical knowledge, practice, values, and institutions. Over the past decade, progress in digital history, scientometrics, and computational linguistics has led to new approaches and techniques for the analysis of the ‘big data’ of medical publications ( Boyack et al., 2005 Börner, 2010 Jones et al., 2011 Weisz et al., 2017 Thompson et al., 2016 Westergaard et al., 2018). Other online databases, notably PubMed and Web of Science, allow slightly more sophisticated searches, but neither realizes the potential of or even captures the full 137-year history of JAMA and the 209-year history of NEJM. It is possible to do basic searches through JAMA’s and NEJM’s search interfaces, but it is difficult to analyze trends over time or perform more sophisticated analyses. ![]() They serve as rich data sources for the exploration of such trends. The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA, founded in 1883) and the New England Journal of Medicine ( NEJM, founded in 1812) have played critical roles in the development of medical knowledge and practice. ![]() Medicine and medical language evolve over time, and this evolution can manifest in thematic expansion and contraction of vocabulary, lexical, and semantic changes, and cultural shifts of usage and meaning. Leveraging a dataset comprised of nearly half-a-million articles published in the Journal of the American Medical Association ( JAMA) and the New England Journal of Medicine ( NEJM) over the past 200 years, we (a) highlight the evolution of medical language, and its manifestations in shifts of usage and meaning, (b) examine traces of the medical profession’s changing self-identity over time, reflected in its shifting ethical and epistemic underpinnings, (c) analyze medicine’s material underpinnings and how we describe where medicine is practiced, (d) demonstrate how the occurrence of specific disease terms within the journals reflects the changing burden of disease itself over time and the interests and perspectives of authors and editors, and (e) showcase how this dataset can allow us to explore the evolution of modern medical ideas and further our understanding of how modern disease concepts came to be, and of the retained legacies of prior embedded values. Analysis of the content of medical journals enables us to frame the shifting scientific, material, ethical, and epistemic underpinnings of medicine over time, including today. ![]()
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