The Structure of Medical Informatics Journal Literature
- Affiliations of the authors: University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio (TAM); Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (KWM)
- Correspondence and reprints: Theodore A. Morris, University of Cincinnati Medical Center Academic Information Technology and Libraries, 231 Bethesda Avenue, P.O. Box 670574, Cincinnati, OH 45267-0574. e-mail: 〈theodore.morris{at}uc.edu〉
- Received 25 November 1997
- Accepted 30 April 1998
Abstract
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.
Footnotes
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This work was supported in part by a Title II fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education (TAM).
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↵* Bradford21 states that “If scientific journals are arranged in order of decreasing productivity of articles on a given subject, they may be divided into a nucleus of periodicals more particularly devoted to the subject and several groups of zones containing the same number of articles as the nucleus, when the number of periodicals in the nucleus and succeeding zones will be as 1:n:n.2.” Although the precise mathematics of the relationship has been the subject of ongoing discussion since Bradford first proposed it in 1934, the general operation remains strikingly applicable across disciplines.
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↵† Had there been several different JAMIA articles cited in this source paper, the cocitation count for JAMIA with each of the other two journal titles would still have been 1.
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↵‡ All searches were limited to the accession number ranges 12004611-14023577 for SCISEARCH and 02440512-02773348 for SOCIAL SCISEARCH by using Dialog's LIMITALL command.
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↵∥ Copies of all data sets and SPSS analyses are available from Mr. Morris.
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↵¶ For the two-dimensional SCI representation in Figure 3, the R2 (proportion of explained variance in the model) is 0.913 and the stress—given as Kruskal's Stress 137—is 0.152. The SSCI representation in Figure 5 illustrates a model with R2=0.896 and stress = 0.175.
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↵# The phrase “individual differences” comes from the original purpose of this approach—to collect proximities data from, say, 12 experimental subjects, map the 12 data sets jointly, and then examine each subject's personal perspective map as a weighted version of the summary map.
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↵** In Helm's study,44 the observations of subjects with normal color sight mapped as a circle corresponding to the color wheel, with the orthogonal axes of the two-dimensional map anchored by red and green and by blue and yellow, whereas color-blind subjects' observations mapped as ellipses—they did not consider the red-green (or blue-yellow) information as strongly when making color-matching decisions.
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↵†† In order of ranking from Sittig and Kaalaas-Sittig,45 these journals are Computers and Biomedical Research, MD Computing, Methods of Information in Medicine, Medical Decision Making, Computers in Biology and Medicine, Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Sciences, Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine, Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing, International Journal of Clinical Monitoring and Computing, Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, Medical Informatics, International Journal of Bio-Medical Computing, Computers in Nursing, Computer Applications in the Biosciences, and Journal of Medical Systems.
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↵‡‡ The journals, in order of ranking by Sittig,46 are Computer Applications in the Biosciences, Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine, International Journal of Bio-Medical Computing, Computers in Biology and Medicine, Computers in Nursing, Computers and Biomedical Research, Methods of Information in Medicine, MD Computing, Medical Informatics, Journal of Medical Systems, and International Journal of Clinical Monitoring and Computing.
