Data governance and open sharing in the fields of life sciences and medicine: A bibliometric analysis

This study aims to conduct a bibliometric analysis of literature related to data governance and open sharing in the fields of life sciences and medicine, so as to clarify the characteristics of publications and explore research hotspots and trends.

A total of 2529 valid documents published in the Web of Science Core Collection database from 2000 to 2024 were included in this study. VOSviewer was used for co-occurrence analysis, while CiteSpace was employed for clustering, burst detection, and thematic evolution analysis.

Between 2000 and 2024, the number of studies on data governance and open sharing in the fields of life sciences and medicine has increased annually, indicating the growing importance of research in this area. The USA led as the country with the most research output in this field. The University of Oxford was the institution with the highest publication volume, Amy L. McGuire was the most active author, and the Journal of Medical Internet Research and the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association were the most frequent publication outlets. The most cited reference was 'Comment: The FAIR Guiding Principles for Scientific Data Management and Stewardship'.

Topics such as the FAIR principles, ethical issues, public attitudes toward data sharing, data quality, databases, and big data analysis techniques are hotspots in this field. Potential research frontiers include the FAIR principles, data quality, public trust and attitudes toward data sharing, the application of artificial intelligence technology in data governance and sharing, governance and sharing of epidemiological and public health data, governance and sharing of data on chronic diseases such as diabetes, and the construction of data governance models.