Summary
Introduction: This article is part of a For-Discussion-Section of Methods of Information in Medicine on “Biomedical Informatics: We are what we publish“. It is introduced by an editorial
and followed by a commentary paper with invited comments. In subsequent issues the
discussion may continue through letters to the editor.
Objective: Informatics experts have attempted to define the field via consensus projects which
has led to consensus statements by both AMIA. and by IMIA. We add to the output of
this process the results of a study of the Pubmed publications with abstracts from
the field of Biomedical Informatics.
Methods: We took the terms from the AMIA consensus document and the terms from the IMIA definitions
of the field of Biomedical Informatics and combined them through human review to create
the Health Infor -matics Ontology. We built a terminology server using the Intelligent
Natural Language Processor (iNLP). Then we downloaded the entire set of articles in
Medline identified by searching the literature by “Medical Informatics” OR “Bioinformatics”.
The articles were parsed by the joint AMIA / IMIA terminology and then again using
SNOMED CT and for the Bioinformatics they were also parsed using HGNC Ontology.
Results: We identified 153,580 articles using “Medical Informatics” and 20,573 articles using
“Bioinformatics”. This resulted in 168,298 unique articles and an overlap of 5,855
articles. Of these 62,244 articles (37%) had titles and abstracts that contained at
least one concept from the Health Infor -matics Ontology. SNOMED CT indexing showed
that the field interacts with most all clinical fields of medicine.
Conclusions: Further defining the field by what we publish can add value to the consensus driven
processes that have been the mainstay of the efforts to date. Next steps should be
to extract terms from the literature that are uncovered and create class hierarchies
and relationships for this content. We should also examine the high occurring of MeSH
terms as markers to define Biomedical Informatics. Greater understanding of the Biomedical
Informatics Literature has the potential to lead to improved self-awareness for our
field.
Keywords
Medical informatics - bioinformatics - publication record - expert consensus - ontology
