Yearb Med Inform 2016; 25(S 01): S130-S138
DOI: 10.15265/IYS-2016-s003
Original Article
Georg Thieme Verlag KG Stuttgart

Visualization of the IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics Publications over the Last 25 Years

D. W. Yergens
1   Department of Community Health Sciences, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
,
H. Tam-Tham
1   Department of Community Health Sciences, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
,
E. P. Minty
2   Department of Medicine, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
› Author Affiliations
Further Information

Correspondence to:

Dean W. Yergens
Department of Community Health Sciences
University of Calgary
Calgary, Alberta
Canada

Publication History

30 June 2016

Publication Date:
06 March 2018 (online)

 

Summary

Background: The last 25 years have been a period of innovation in the area of medical informatics. The International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) has published, every year for the last quarter century, the Yearbook of Medical Informatics, collating selected papers from various journals in an attempt to provide a summary of the academic medical informatics literature. The objective of this paper is to visualize the evolution of the medical informatics field over the last 25 years according to the frequency of word occurrences in the papers published in the IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics.

Methods: A literature review was conducted examining the IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics between 1992 and 2015. These references were collated into a reference manager application to examine the literature using keyword searches, word clouds, and topic clustering. The data was considered in its entirety, as well as segregated into 3 time periods to examine the evolution of main trends over time. Several methods were used, including word clouds, cluster maps, and custom developed web-based information dashboards.

Results: The literature search resulted in a total of 1210 references published in the Yearbook, of which 213 references were excluded, resulting in 997 references for visualization. Overall, we found that publications were more technical and methods-oriented between 1992 and 1999; more clinically and patient-oriented between 2000 and 2009; and noted the emergence of “big data”, decision support, and global health in the past decade between 2010 and 2015. Dashboards were additionally created to show individual reference data, as well as, aggregated information.

Conclusion: Medical informatics is a vast and expanding area with new methods and technologies being researched, implemented, and evaluated. Determining visualization approaches that enhance our understanding of literature is an active area of research, and like medical informatics, is constantly evolving as new software and algorithms are developed. This paper examined several approaches for visualizing the medical informatics literature to show historical trends, associations, and aggregated summarized information to illustrate the state and changes in the IMIA Yearbook publications over the last quarter century.


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  • References

  • 1 Haux R, Kulikowski C. editors. IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics. Digitial Libraries and Medicine. Stuttgart, Germany: Schattauer Verlagsgesellschaft mbH; 2001
  • 2 Jaulent M, Lehmann C, Séroussi B. editors. IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics. Patient-Centered Care Coordination ed. Stuttgart, Germany: Schattauer GmbH; 2015
  • 3 Seroussi B, Jaulent MC, Lehmann CU. Health information technology challenges to support patient-centered care coordination. Yearb Med Inform 2015; 10 (Suppl. 01) 8-10.
  • 4 Deshazo JP, Lavallie DL, Wolf FM. Publication trends in the medical informatics literature: 20 years of “medical informatics” in MeSH. BMC Med Inform Decis Mak 2009 9:7-6947-9-7.
  • 5 Mihalas GI. Evolution of trends in european medical informatics. Acta Informatica Medica 2014; 22 (Suppl. 01) 37.
  • 6 Synnestvedt MB, Chen C, Holmes JH. Visual exploration of landmarks and trends in the medical informatics literature. AMIA Annu Symp Proc 2005; 1129
  • 7 Synnestvedt MB, Chen C, Holmes JH. CiteSpace II: Visualization and knowledge discovery in bibliographic databases. AMIA Annu Symp Proc 2005; 724-8.
  • 8 Douglas SM, Montelione GT, Gerstein M. PubNet: A flexible system for visualizing literature derived networks. Genome Biol 2005; 6 (Suppl. 09) R80.
  • 9 Yergens D, Ray J, Doig C. KSv2: Application for enhancing scoping and systematic reviews. AMIA Annu Symp Proc 2012
  • 10 Yergens DW, Dutton DJ, Patten SB. An overview of the statistical methods reported by studies using the canadian community health survey. BMC Med Res Methodol 2014 14:15-2288-14-15.
  • 11 Gill D, Griffin A. Good medical practice: What are we trying to say?. textual analysis using tag clouds. Med Educ 2010 44(3).
  • 12 Osinski S, Weiss D. Carrot2: An open source framework for search results clustering (poster). 26th European Conference on Information Retrieval Sunderland, UK: 2004
  • 13 Osinski S, Stefanowski J, Weiss D. Lingo: Search results clustering algorithm based on singular value decomposition. Advances in Soft Computing, Intelligent Information Processing and Web Mining, Proceedings of the International IIS: IIPWM´04 Conference, Zakopane, Poland; 2004; 359-68.
  • 14 Yergens D, Minty E, Doig C. Visualization of publication timelines using 4K monitors. American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) 2014 Annual Symposium.; Washington, DC.:
  • 15 Bostock M. D3.js - data-driven documents. d3js.org. Updated October, 2015
  • 16 Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Contributors.. Timeline - Web widget for visualizing temporal data. http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/. Updated 2009
  • 17 University of Calgary.. Visualization studio. library.ucalgary.ca/viz. Updated October, 2015

Correspondence to:

Dean W. Yergens
Department of Community Health Sciences
University of Calgary
Calgary, Alberta
Canada

  • References

  • 1 Haux R, Kulikowski C. editors. IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics. Digitial Libraries and Medicine. Stuttgart, Germany: Schattauer Verlagsgesellschaft mbH; 2001
  • 2 Jaulent M, Lehmann C, Séroussi B. editors. IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics. Patient-Centered Care Coordination ed. Stuttgart, Germany: Schattauer GmbH; 2015
  • 3 Seroussi B, Jaulent MC, Lehmann CU. Health information technology challenges to support patient-centered care coordination. Yearb Med Inform 2015; 10 (Suppl. 01) 8-10.
  • 4 Deshazo JP, Lavallie DL, Wolf FM. Publication trends in the medical informatics literature: 20 years of “medical informatics” in MeSH. BMC Med Inform Decis Mak 2009 9:7-6947-9-7.
  • 5 Mihalas GI. Evolution of trends in european medical informatics. Acta Informatica Medica 2014; 22 (Suppl. 01) 37.
  • 6 Synnestvedt MB, Chen C, Holmes JH. Visual exploration of landmarks and trends in the medical informatics literature. AMIA Annu Symp Proc 2005; 1129
  • 7 Synnestvedt MB, Chen C, Holmes JH. CiteSpace II: Visualization and knowledge discovery in bibliographic databases. AMIA Annu Symp Proc 2005; 724-8.
  • 8 Douglas SM, Montelione GT, Gerstein M. PubNet: A flexible system for visualizing literature derived networks. Genome Biol 2005; 6 (Suppl. 09) R80.
  • 9 Yergens D, Ray J, Doig C. KSv2: Application for enhancing scoping and systematic reviews. AMIA Annu Symp Proc 2012
  • 10 Yergens DW, Dutton DJ, Patten SB. An overview of the statistical methods reported by studies using the canadian community health survey. BMC Med Res Methodol 2014 14:15-2288-14-15.
  • 11 Gill D, Griffin A. Good medical practice: What are we trying to say?. textual analysis using tag clouds. Med Educ 2010 44(3).
  • 12 Osinski S, Weiss D. Carrot2: An open source framework for search results clustering (poster). 26th European Conference on Information Retrieval Sunderland, UK: 2004
  • 13 Osinski S, Stefanowski J, Weiss D. Lingo: Search results clustering algorithm based on singular value decomposition. Advances in Soft Computing, Intelligent Information Processing and Web Mining, Proceedings of the International IIS: IIPWM´04 Conference, Zakopane, Poland; 2004; 359-68.
  • 14 Yergens D, Minty E, Doig C. Visualization of publication timelines using 4K monitors. American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) 2014 Annual Symposium.; Washington, DC.:
  • 15 Bostock M. D3.js - data-driven documents. d3js.org. Updated October, 2015
  • 16 Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Contributors.. Timeline - Web widget for visualizing temporal data. http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/. Updated 2009
  • 17 University of Calgary.. Visualization studio. library.ucalgary.ca/viz. Updated October, 2015