The Intellectual Structure of Health and Medical Informatics

This paper presents the results of an author co-citation analysis of the health and medical informatics discipline. It updates a smaller study that focused on health information systems. Drawing on such subfields as bio informatics, clinical decision support systems, computational genomics, e-health, health informatics, and others, this body of knowledge defines the core internal structure of the discipline and delineates its sub-fields. An author co-citation analysis was performed for a nine-year period using the members of editorial boards of several medical informatics-related journals as an initial author sample (N = 272). Several multivariate analyses, including cluster analysis, factor analysis and multidimensional scaling, were performed. The authors results confirm that several established sub-fields still stand but a number of new sub-fields are emerging. Future research can build on this work and examine other journals and additional authors to gain insights into the collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of the health and medical informatics discipline.