A Longitudinal Social Network Analysis of the Editorial Boards of Medical Informatics and Bioinformatics Journals

Methods: In this paper, we propose a social network analysis model to study how editorial boards integrate researchers from disparate communities. We evaluate our model by building relational networks based on the editorial boards of approximately 40 journals that serve as research outlets in medical informatics and bioinformatics. We track the evolution of editorial relationships through a longitudinal investigation over the years 2000 through 2005. Results: Our findings suggest that there are research journals that support the collocation of editorial board members from the bioinformatics and medical informatics communities. Network centrality metrics indicate that editorial board members are located in the intersection of the communities and that the number of individuals in the intersection is growing with time. Conclusions: Social network analysis methods provide insight into the relationships between the medical informatics and bioinformatics communities. The number of editorial board members facilitating the publication intersection of the communities has grown, but the intersection remains dependent on a small group of individuals and fragile. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2007;14:340–348. DOI 10.1197/jamia.M2228. Until recently the medical informatics and bioinformatics communities led relatively separate existences. As a result of the independence with which the two communities functioned, each developed and cultivated diverging research agendas, as well as journals and publication outlets. However, the integration of molecular and genomic information into clinical practice and electronic medical records has Affiliations of the authors: Department of Biomedical Informatics, School of Medicine (BM), Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN; Institute for Software Research, School of Computer Science (KC), Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA. Funded in part by National Science Foundation Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship grant 9972762 in Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems. The views expressed in this manuscript are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the federal government or the management of the journals used in this study. The authors acknowledge helpful discussions with Edoardo Airoldi, George Davis, and Latanya Sweeney. The authors thank all of the editors and publishers that provided archived journals and lists of editorial boards, with special note to Nancy Lorenzi, Randy Miller, and Ted Shortliffe. Social network graphs were produced with the software program UCINET. Correspondence and reprints: Bradley Malin, PhD, Eskind Biomedical Library, Fourth Floor, Department of Biomedical Informatics, School of Medicine, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 372328340; E-mail: [email protected] . Received for review: 7/28/2006; accepted for publication: 1/29/ 2007. spurned a convergence in education, practice, and research. The burgeoning relationship was expressed in 2002 at the Annual Fall Symposium of the American Medical Informatics Association, where the Scientific Program Chair called for an integration under a community called “Bio*medical Informatics: One Discipline.” Broadly speaking, the goal of the new society is to support a bridge between bioinformatics and medical informatics in the form of a biomedical informatics community. New communities are built, in part, through partnerships of individuals within and between existing communities. To build a new research community, it is necessary for researchers to interact, collaborate, and integrate ideas. Previous community-oriented research sought to identify relationships between various informatics communities by studying the co-citations and co-authors in published articles. While citations illustrate who is reading and relating their research to whom, but it does not capture how one community is exposed to another. Similarly, author partnerships provide an indication of research groups that exist, but not how such groups come together or communicate with research communities at large. One manner by which partnerships across communities are initiated by exposure to each community’s research, which implies that platforms to facilitate exposure are beneficial to new community building. Exposure platforms are diverse and range across informal meetings in the workplace, calls for interdisciplinary research grant Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association Volume 14 Number 3 May / June 2007 341 proposals, and journals or conferences that enable researchers to share their findings with their peers. Within this context, program managers, conference program committee members, and journal editorial board (EB) members function as figureheads with the ability to facilitate exposure, communication, and interdisciplinary research. In this article we evaluate how figureheads of medical informatics and bioinformatics, in the form of journal EB members (defined as also including editors and associate editors), are grouped together on editorial boards. We investigate the question, “How are members of the medical informatics and bioinformatics communities associated on various journals in an editorial capacity?” Moreover, “To what extent do these journals support an intersection of the communities?” This research analyzes the intersection of figureheads from the medical informatics and bioinformatics communities using social networking analysis, i.e., associations based on groupings of people. We utilize several methods from social network analysis and information retrieval to study the intersection as inferred by the editorial boards of bioinformatics and medical informatics research journals. More specifically, we utilize “centrality” metrics to evaluate where individuals and journals are situated in the biomedical intersection. This article extends our initial investigations to account for the evolution of the intersection. The biomedical community is evolving, and to reflect this fact, we study a longitudinal setting by tracking changes in the network over the years 2000 through 2005. Our principal findings suggest that: (1) there exist EB members and journals in the intersection of the medical informatics and bioinformatics communities and (2) the number of editors in the intersection has grown with time.