Identifying Emerging Trends in Medical Informatics: A Synthesis Approach

Medical informatics is a young and rapidly evolving field, influenced by and impacting on many different knowledge domains. Recent contributions on scoping the associated body of knowledge are confounded both by variations in popular use of terminology for established areas, and by the advent of new areas without yet established terminology. Determining the scope of a topic through online bibliographic search filters is a well-established approach in scientific research and has been developed as a human-directed task. Establishing the best approach and automating the process has proved a difficult problem. This paper explores the use of text analysis of bibliographic information using available search engines and NVIVO text analysis tools to test the potential for dynamic word based filters based on data mining. Results show that word searches of abstracts are more effective than topic searches for identifying health informatics papers, however more work is required to refine search terms to improve generalisability. Using data mining to track changes in word use in medical informatics journals, may make it possible to establish a more dynamic search filter to match the evolving nature of the field of health informatics.