A Decade of Translational Bioinformatics: A Retrospective Analysis of "Year-in-Review" Presentations

For the past 11 years, the year-in-review (YIR) keynote presentation at the AMIA Informatics summit has been a perennial highlight. We hypothesized that the presented material from these keynotes could be used to assess both the recent trajectory of topics in informatics-especially translational bioinformatics (TBI)-as well as the scientific merit of the crowd-sourced process used to nominate, review, and select the papers presented at the YIR. We compare YIR articles to a background set of non-YIR articles from informatics journals using structured metadata and qualitative thematic analysis, paying specific attention to trends and popularity over time. These trends were inspected both internally (comparing the YIR sessions to each other) and externally (comparing them to the overall content of scientific literature for the same time period). In doing so, we identified some unexpected patterns that suggest important opportunities for TBI research in the future.