A Bibliometric Analysis and Visualization of Medical Big Data Research

TLDR

Medical care has entered a big‑data era driven by “Internet plus,” yet bibliometric and visualization studies of medical big data remain scarce. This study investigates the current status of medical big data by visualizing journal‑paper analyses related to the field. We examined 988 references from the Web of Science SCI‑Expanded and SSCI databases across all years, applying GraphPad Prism 5, VOSviewer, and CiteSpace for analysis. The analysis reveals annual trends, leading journals and institutions, country‑level citation metrics, keyword distributions, highly cited works, co‑authorship patterns, and influential authors, thereby outlining MBD development trends and providing a reference for future visualization research.

Abstract

With the rapid development of “Internet plus”, medical care has entered the era of big data. However, there is little research on medical big data (MBD) from the perspectives of bibliometrics and visualization. The substantive research on the basic aspects of MBD itself is also rare. This study aims to explore the current status of medical big data through visualization analysis on the journal papers related to MBD. We analyze a total of 988 references which were downloaded from the Science Citation Index Expanded and the Social Science Citation Index databases from Web of Science and the time span was defined as “all years”. The GraphPad Prism 5, VOSviewer and CiteSpace softwares are used for analysis. Many results concerning the annual trends, the top players in terms of journal and institute levels, the citations and H-index in terms of country level, the keywords distribution, the highly cited papers, the co-authorship status and the most influential journals and authors are presented in this paper. This study points out the development status and trends on MBD. It can help people in the medical profession to get comprehensive understanding on the state of the art of MBD. It also has reference values for the research and application of the MBD visualization methods.