The Logic Model Is Younger Than It Looks: A Bibliometric and Conceptual Analysis of "Logic Model" in PubMed and Scopus, 1970–2025

This preprint examines how old the term "logic model" is, where its present sense first appeared, and how health research uses it. All PubMed records mentioning logic models in the title, abstract, or author keywords (1,856 records, 1991–2025) and all Scopus records with the same terms (6,454 records, 1970–2025) were analyzed, with Scopus records sorted by rule into an engineering and formal-logic sense and a program-evaluation sense. Before 1992 the term is used only in engineering and logic; the program-evaluation sense first appears in 1992, with the earliest records in Canadian health and evaluation journals, almost the same age as "evidence-based medicine". With countries and institutions corrected for package defaults, the United Kingdom stands level with the United States. Abstract sentences show the logic model increasingly as something constructed rather than applied or tested. A quarter of the PubMed records are not in Scopus, and almost half of the evaluation-sense Scopus records are not in PubMed. Scripts and output tables are deposited at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23933472.