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 natu re and internal structure of the field. Design: To better understand t he field's disciplinary nature, the authors examine the intercitation relationships of its journal literature. To determine its internal str ucture, they examined its journal cocitation patterns. Measurements: T he authors used data from the Science Citation Index (SCI) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) to perform intercitation studies among p roductive journal titles, and software routines from SPSS to perform m ultivariate data analyses on cocitation data for proposed core journal s. Results: Intercitation network analysis suggests that a core litera ture exists, one mark of a separate discipline. Multivariate analyses of cocitation data suggest that major focus areas within the field inc lude biomedical engineering, biomedical computing, decision support an d education. The interpretable dimensions of multidimensional scaling maps differed for the SCI and SSCI data sets. Strong links to informat ion science literature were not found. Conclusion: The authors saw ind ications of a core literature and of several major research fronts. Th e field appears to be viewed differently by authors writing in journal s indexed by SCI from those writing in journals indexed by SSCI, with more emphasis placed on computers and engineering versus decision maki ng by the farmer and more emphasis on theory versus application (clini cal practice) by the latter.