The Health Economics Core Library Project consists of selected books, journals, Web sites, and bibliographic databases relating to health economics. Produced by AcademyHealth at the request of the National Library of Medicine's National Information Center on Health Services Research and Health Care Technology (NICHSR), the project focuses on developing the core and desired sets of resources in health economics.

AcademyHealth staff worked with panels of academic experts and librarians to capture the full range of resources in the field. First, expanding on the definition of health economics found in Slee’s Health Care Terms, 4th Edition (2001), and with panelists’ approval, staff developed the following working definition of health economics:

Health economics is the branch of economics (a social science) that deals with the provision of health care services, their delivery, and their use, with special attention to quantifying the demands and measuring outcomes for such services, the social, financial, and opportunity costs of such services, and of their delivery, and the benefits obtained. More emphasis is given to the costs and benefits of health care to a population than to the individual. It is dynamic in nature and based on changing health issues.

Using the working definition as a guide, staff tallied resource recommendations from panelists, culled through course syllabi, library collections, and the Internet, and developed and ranked lists of core and desired resources in health economics. Staff worked with academic experts and librarians to filter the lists, separating the books, journals, and bibliographic databases into core and desired categories. For the purposes of this project, resources labeled “core” are those deemed essential in order to assemble a basic health economics collection. Resources labeled “desired” are additional health economics resources that an individual might acquire or subscribe to.

Accordingly, staff created the following four lists:

• Core health economics books and journals
• Desired health economics books and journals
• Core and desired health economics bibliographic databases, and
• Relevant health economics Web sites.

The primary focus of this product is US publications. Because some individuals may be interested in the international context of health economics, the desired list contains selected, but by no means complete, list international titles. To supplement the health economics core book list, AcademyHealth produced a separate list of book titles addressing methods of economic evaluation in health and public health, including the valuation of health states, as well as a list of selected titles applying economic evaluation to specific subject areas within the broad category of health and public health.

For more information please contact Virginia Van Horne at virginia.vanhorne@academyhealth.org. The full text of the AcademyHealth Report is available on the NICHSR Web site.

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