Toward a veterinary informatics research agenda: an analysis of the PubMed-indexed literature

Veterinary medicine and human health are inextricably intertwined. Effective tracking of veterinary information - veterinary informatics - impacts not only veterinary medicine, but also public health, informatics research, and clinical care. However, veterinary informatics has received little attention from the general biomedical informatics community.

To identify both active and under-researched areas in veterinary informatics, we retrieved Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) descriptors for veterinary informatics-related citations and analyzed them by topic category, animal type, and journal.

We found that the categories of veterinary informatics with the most growth were information/bibliographical retrieval, hardware/programming, and radiology/imaging. Less than two articles per year were published in the areas of computerized veterinary medical records, clinical decision support, standards, and controlled vocabularies. Veterinary informatics articles primarily address production animals such as cattle and sheep, and companion animals such as cats and dogs. Six journals account for 31% of the veterinary informatics literature, 35 journals account for 66%.

Veterinary informatics remains an embryonic field with relatively few publications. With the exception of radiology/imaging, published articles are primarily focused on non-clinical areas such as hardware/programming and information retrieval. There are very few publications on controlled vocabularies, standards, methodologies for integrating disparate systems, computerized medical records, clinical decision support systems, and system usability. The lack of publications in these areas may hamper efforts to collect and track animal health data at a time when such data are potentially critical to human health.