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The Top 100 Articles in the Medical Informatics: a Bibliometric Analysis

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Abstract

The number of citations that a research paper receives can be used as a measure of its scientific impact. The objective of this study was to identify and to examine the characteristics of top 100 cited articles in the field of Medical Informatics based on data acquired from the Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science (WOS) in October, 2016. The data was collected using two procedures: first we included articles published in the 24 journals listed in the “Medical Informatics” category; second, we retrieved articles using the key words: “informatics”, “medical informatics”, “biomedical informatics”, ”clinical informatics” and “health informatics”. After removing duplicate records, articles were ranked by the number of citations they received. When the 100 top cited articles had been identified, we collected the following information for each record: all WOS database citations, year of publication, journal, author names, authors’ affiliation, country of origin and topics indexed for each record. Citations for the top 100 articles ranged from 346 to 7875, and citations per year ranged from 11.12 to 525. The majority of articles were published in the 2000s (n=43) and 1990s (n=38). Articles were published across 10 journals, most commonly Statistics in medicine (n=71) and Medical decision making (n=28). The articles had an average of 2.47 authors. Statistics and biostatistics modeling was the most common topic (n=71), followed by artificial intelligence (n=12), and medical errors (n=3), other topics included data mining, diagnosis, bioinformatics, information retrieval, and medical imaging. Our bibliometric analysis illustrated a historical perspective on the progress of scientific research on Medical Informatics. Moreover, the findings of the current study provide an insight on the frequency of citations for top cited articles published in Medical Informatics as well as quality of the works, journals, and the trends steering Medical Informatics.

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Notes

  1. HistCite™ Inc. Released 2008. Garfield, E: Thomson Reuters.

  2. SPSS Inc. Released 2007. SPSS for Windows, Version 20.0. Chicago, SPSS Inc.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the Research Committee of Urmia University of Medical Sciences, for their valuable supporting of this research.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Health Information Technology, Urmia University of Medical Sciences, Urmia, Iran

    Hamed Nadri & Bahlol Rahimi

  2. Student Research Committee, Urmia University of Medical Sciences, Urmia, Iran

    Hamed Nadri

  3. Department of computer and information Sciences, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden

    Toomas Timpka

  4. Department of Medical and Health Sciences, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden

    Toomas Timpka

  5. Department of Librarianship and Medical Information Science, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran

    Shahram Sedghi

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  1. Hamed Nadri
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  2. Bahlol Rahimi
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Contributions

Bahlol Rahimi and Hamed Nadri were the responsible for the study design, data analysis, interpretation of results, and drafting the manuscript.

Toomas Timpka contributed to the design of the study, data analysis, and revision of the manuscript.

Shahram Sedghi contributed to the design of the study and revision of the manuscript.

All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Bahlol Rahimi.

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Nadri, H., Rahimi, B., Timpka, T. et al. The Top 100 Articles in the Medical Informatics: a Bibliometric Analysis. J Med Syst 41, 150 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-017-0794-4

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