A Quantitative Ranking of the Biomedical Informatics Serials

*informatics: Identifying and Tracking Informatics Sub-Discipline Terms in the Literature

OBJECTIVE

To identify the breadth of informatics sub-discipline terms used in the literature for enabling subsequent organization and searching by sub-discipline.

METHODS

Titles in five literature sources were analyzed to extract terms for informatics sub-disciplines: 1) United States (U.S.) Library of Congress Online Catalog, 2) English Wikipedia, 3) U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) Catalog, 4) PubMed, and 5) PubMed Central. The extracted terms were combined and standardized with those in four vocabulary sources to create an integrated list: 1) Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), 2) Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), 3) U.S. National Cancer Institute Thesaurus (NCIt), and 4) EMBRACE Data and Methods (EDAM). Searches for terms in titles from each literature source were conducted to obtain frequency counts and start years for characterizing established and potentially emerging sub-disciplines.

RESULTS

Analysis of 6,949 titles from literature sources and 67 terms from vocabulary sources resulted in an integrated list of 382 terms for informatics sub-disciplines mapped to 292 preferred terms. In the last five decades, "bioinformatics", "medical informatics", "health informatics", "nursing informatics", and "biomedical informatics" were associated with the most literature. In the current decade, potentially emerging sub-disciplines include "disability informatics", "neonatal informatics", and "nanoinformatics" based on literature from the last five years.

CONCLUSIONS

As the field of informatics continues to expand and advance, keeping up-to-date with historical and current trends will become increasingly challenging. The ability to track the accomplishments and evolution of a particular sub-discipline in the literature could be valuable for supporting informatics research, education, and training.

Two h-index benchmarks for evaluating the publication performance of medical informatics researchers

BACKGROUND

The h-index is a commonly used metric for evaluating the publication performance of researchers. However, in a multidisciplinary field such as medical informatics, interpreting the h-index is a challenge because researchers tend to have diverse home disciplines, ranging from clinical areas to computer science, basic science, and the social sciences, each with different publication performance profiles.

OBJECTIVE

To construct a reference standard for interpreting the h-index of medical informatics researchers based on the performance of their peers.

METHODS

Using a sample of authors with articles published over the 5-year period 2006-2011 in the 2 top journals in medical informatics (as determined by impact factor), we computed their h-index using the Scopus database. Percentiles were computed to create a 6-level benchmark, similar in scheme to one used by the US National Science Foundation, and a 10-level benchmark.

RESULTS

The 2 benchmarks can be used to place medical informatics researchers in an ordered category based on the performance of their peers. A validation exercise mapped the benchmark levels to the ranks of medical informatics academic faculty in the United States. The 10-level benchmark tracked academic rank better (with no ties) and is therefore more suitable for practical use.

CONCLUSIONS

Our 10-level benchmark provides an objective basis to evaluate and compare the publication performance of medical informatics researchers with that of their peers using the h-index.

[Archivos de Bronconeumología: among the 3 Spanish medical journals with the highest national impact factors]

OBJECTIVE

Citation analysis elucidates patterns of information consumption within professional communities. The aim of this study was to analyze the citations of 87 Spanish medical journals by calculating their impact factors and immediacy indices for 2001, and to estimate the importance of Archivos de Bronconeumología within the framework of Spanish medicine.

MATERIAL AND METHOD

Eighty-seven Spanish medical journals were included. All were listed in the Spanish Medical Index (Indice Medico Español) and in at least one of the following databases: MEDLINE, BIOSIS, EMBASE, or Science Citation Index. References to articles from 1999 through 2001 in citable articles from 2001 were analyzed. Using the method of the Institute for Scientific Information, we calculated the national impact factor and immediacy index for each journal.

RESULTS

The journals with the highest national impact factors were Revista Española de Quimioterapia (0.894), Medicina Clínica (0.89), and Archivos de Bronconeumología (0.732). The self-citation percentage of Archivos de Bronconeumología was 18.3% and the immediacy index was 0.033.

CONCLUSIONS

The impact factor obtained by Archivos de Bronconeumología confirms its importance in Spanish medicine and validates its inclusion as a source journal in Science Citation Index and Journal Citation Report.

The structure of medical informatics journal literature

OBJECTIVE

Medical informatics is an emergent interdisciplinary field described as drawing upon and contributing to both the health sciences and information sciences. The authors elucidate the disciplinary nature and internal structure of the field.

DESIGN

To better understand the field's disciplinary nature, the authors examine the intercitation relationships of its journal literature. To determine its internal structure, they examined its journal cocitation patterns.

MEASUREMENTS

The authors used data from the Science Citation Index (SCI) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) to perform intercitation studies among productive journal titles, and software routines from SPSS to perform multivariate data analyses on cocitation data for proposed core journals.

RESULTS

Intercitation network analysis suggests that a core literature exists, one mark of a separate discipline. Multivariate analyses of cocitation data suggest that major focus areas within the field include biomedical engineering, biomedical computing, decision support, and education. The interpretable dimensions of multidimensional scaling maps differed for the SCI and SSCI data sets. Strong links to information science literature were not found.

CONCLUSION

The authors saw indications of a core literature and of several major research fronts. The field appears to be viewed differently by authors writing in journals indexed by SCI from those writing in journals indexed by SSCI, with more emphasis placed on computers and engineering versus decision making by the former and more emphasis on theory versus application (clinical practice) by the latter.