Summary
Objective: To identify the breadth of informatics sub-discipline terms used in the literature
for enabling subsequent organization and searching by sub-discipline.
Methods: Titles in five literature sources were analyzed to extract terms for informatics
sub-disciplines: 1) United States (U.S.) Library of Congress Online Catalog, 2) English
Wikipedia, 3) U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) Catalog, 4) PubMed, and 5) PubMed
Central. The extracted terms were combined and standardized with those in four vocabulary
sources to create an integrated list: 1) Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH),
2) Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), 3) U.S. National Cancer Institute Thesaurus (NCIt),
and 4) EMBRACE Data and Methods (EDAM). Searches for terms in titles from each literature
source were conducted to obtain frequency counts and start years for characterizing
established and potentially emerging sub-disciplines.
Results: Analysis of 6,949 titles from literature sources and 67 terms from vocabulary sources
resulted in an integrated list of 382 terms for informatics sub-disciplines mapped
to 292 preferred terms. In the last five decades, “bioinformatics”, “medical informatics”,
“health informatics”, “nursing informatics”, and “biomedical informatics” were associated
with the most literature. In the current decade, potentially emerging sub-disciplines
include “disability informatics”, “neonatal informatics”, and “nanoinformatics” based
on literature from the last five years.
Conclusions: As the field of informatics continues to expand and advance, keeping upto-date with
historical and current trends will become increasingly challenging. The ability to
track the accomplishments and evolution of a particular sub-discipline in the literature
could be valuable for supporting informatics research, education, and training.
Keywords
Informatics - publications - controlled vocabulary - bibliometrics
