Abstract
Objectives To identify major research subjects and trends in medical informatics research based
on the current set of core medical informatics journals.
Methods Analyzing journals in the Web of Science (WoS) medical informatics category together
with related categories from the years 2013 to 2017 by using a smart local moving
algorithm as a clustering method for identifying the core set of journals. Text mining
analysis with binary counting of abstracts from these journals published in the years
2006 to 2017 for identifying major research subjects. Building clusters based on these
terms for the complete time period as well as for the periods 2006–2008, 2009–2011,
2012–2014, and 2015–2017 for identifying trends.
Results The identified cluster includes 17 core medical informatics journals. By text mining
of these journals, 224,992 different terms in 14,414 articles were identified covering
550 specific key terms. Based on these key terms five clusters were identified: “Biomedical
Data Analysis,” “Clinical Informatics,” “EHR and Knowledge Representation,” “Mobile
Health,” and “Organizational Aspects of Health Information Systems.” No shifts in
the clusters were observed between the first two 3-year periods. In the third period,
some terms like “mobile phone,” “mobile apps,” and “message” appear. Also, in the
third period, a “Clinical Informatics” cluster appears and persists in the fourth
period. In the fourth period, a rearrangement of clusters was observed.
Conclusions Beside classical subjects of medical informatics on organizing, representing, and
analyzing data, we observed new developments in the context of mobile health and clinical
informatics. These subjects tended to grow over the past years, and we can expect
this trend to continue.
Keywords
medical informatics - biomedical and health informatics - research
