Analyzing the Scientific Community Focused on Nursing Informatics Using Publication Data

The scientific community focused on nursing informatics can be described as a graph with the authors as vertices and the author-coauthor relationship as the connecting edges. Methods to describe and analyze networks like average path length, diameter, centrality measures, or partitioning into subcommunities are applied to the nursing informatics community. It is shown that the community consists of one large connected subnet with many small disjoint subnets, each representing one or several authors. The interconnectivity of the large subnet is quite high indicating an information flow along several different paths. Using different centrality measures important authors for e.g. the information flow can be identified. While each small disjoint subnet represents a small sub-community, the large central subnet can also be partitioned into subcommunities connected with each other. Some seem to be focused on specific aspects of nursing informatics.