In 2018, an effort was made to assess the nature of the HEMS literature published in the era of PubMed. For publications indexed in that National Library of Medicine search engine, those with available on-line abstracts — essentially, those since 1972 — were reviewed and characterized with respect to journal category and publication type (e.g. prospective study, retrospective review, case report). Limited classification of publication subject area was also executed.
At the time of the formal review executed in 2018 (which covered 1972-2017), there were 1,717 such publications. The full report of these findings can be found in the Air Medical Journal.
An informal database of the relevant publications is provided here, and is freely accessible to anyone with interest in HEMS. The HEMS Refs 13 Nov 18 file is very much a work in progress; users are advised to confirm its categorizations and other entries as needed and error notification is appreciated. An EndNote library is also maintained, which is too large for this site — it contains many of the papers in PDF form — but which can be obtained by contacting the CCT CORE PI (SThomasMD@GMail.com).