Overview of the Health Informatics Research Field: A Bibliometric Approach

Health informatics is a relatively new research area. Over the last decade or so, research in health information has been growing at a very rapid rate, as evidenced by the large number of publications. While this growth has been beneficial to the field, it has also made understanding the scope of the field more difficult. Consequently, it is difficult to answer questions such as how the research field has evolved over time, what the landmark publications are, what impact these publications have had, and who are the most prolific and high impact researchers. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the research field of health informatics and, in doing so, attempt to answer some of the questions just mentioned. To this end, we make use of two bibliometric tools: HistCite and CiteSpace II. Because these tools offer complementary bibliometric methods, their use together provides results that are more robust. In this paper, we report some general findings of our bibliometric analysis using