Characterizing health informatics journals by subject-level dependencies: a citation network analysis

TL;DR

This paper analyzes citation patterns among health informatics journals to understand knowledge flow across disciplines, revealing differences in citation behaviors and inter-field dependencies.

Contribution

It provides a detailed citation network analysis of health informatics journals, highlighting subject-level dependencies and citation behaviors across disciplines.

Findings

JAMIA has more in-citations than JMIR

JMIR has higher out-citations and self-citations

JMS cites more computer science journals

Abstract

Citation network analysis has become one of methods to study how scientific knowledge flows from one domain to another. Health informatics is a multidisciplinary field that includes social science, software engineering, behavioral science, medical science and others. In this study, we perform an analysis of citation statistics from health informatics journals using data set extracted from CrossRef. For each health informatics journal, we extract the number of citations from/to studies related to computer science, medicine/clinical medicine and other fields, including the number of self-citations from the health informatics journal. With a similar number of articles used in our analysis, we show that the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) has more in-citations than the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR); while JMIR has a higher number of out-citations and self-citations. We also show that JMIR cites more articles from health informatics journals and medicine related journals. In addition, the Journal of Medical Systems (JMS) cites more articles from computer science journals compared with other health informatics journals included in our analysis.