The Top 100 Articles in the Medical Informatics: a Bibliometric Analysis

The number of citations that a research paper receives can be used as a measure of its scientific impact. The
objective of this study was to identify and to examine the
characteristics of top 100 cited articles in the field of
Medical Informatics based on data acquired from the
Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science (WOS) in October, 2016.
The data was collected using two procedures: first we included
articles published in the 24 journals listed in the BMedical
Informatics^ category; second, we retrieved articles using the
key words: Binformatics^, Bmedical informatics^, Bbiomedical
informatics^, ^clinical informatics^ and Bhealth informatics^.
After removing duplicate records, articles were ranked by the
number of citations they received. When the 100 top cited
articles had been identified, we collected the following information for each record: all WOS database citations, year of
publication, journal, author names, authors’ affiliation, country of origin and topics indexed for each record. Citations for
the top 100 articles ranged from 346 to 7875, and citations per
year ranged from 11.12 to 525. The majority of articles were
published in the 2000s (n=43) and 1990s (n=38). Articles were
published across 10 journals, most commonly Statistics in
medicine (n=71) and Medical decision making (n=28). The
articles had an average of 2.47 authors. Statistics and biostatistics modeling was the most common topic (n=71), followed
by artificial intelligence (n=12), and medical errors (n=3), other topics included data mining, diagnosis, bioinformatics, information retrieval, and medical imaging. Our bibliometric
analysis illustrated a historical perspective on the progress of
scientific research on Medical Informatics. Moreover, the findings of the current study provide an insight on the frequency of
citations for top cited articles published in Medical Informatics
as well as quality of the works, journals, and the trends
steering Medical Informatics