Content and Trends in Medical Informatics Publications over the Past Two Decades

This study aims to identify subject content and trends in the medical informatics literature in order to shed light on the past, current, and future directions of diverse education and research activities. A list of 36 core medical informatics journals was compiled through expert consensus. We retrieved 60,862 articles from the U.S. National Library of Medicine's MEDLINE database that were published by those journals from 1992 to 2015. A series of descriptive analyses were conducted to reveal the historical productivity of the journals, publications trends, and the subject content based on the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) term frequencies and debut years. We found 73 core topics and 72 new topics of medical informatics within three relevant MeSH categories (informatics, techniques, and healthcare).