Detecting Research Focus and Research Fronts in the Medical Big Data Field Using Co-word and Co-citation Analysis

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the papers of medical big data to identify research focus and research fronts from the perspective of bibliometric analysis. Papers of medical big data were searched in the Web of Science database by topic retrieval, and 2286 publications were retrieved. Bibliometric, co-word and co-citation analysis were employed to reveal the characteristics and status in the field of medical big data. The field of medical big data was growing rapidly, especially in recent years. The research focus and research fronts of medical big data were determined by analyzing the keywords and the citations respectively, with co-word analysis and co-citation analysis being taken into consideration. There were eight research focus and ten research fronts in the field of medical big data, which were displayed by visualization software VOSviewer. The results of this study presented an overview of the characteristics of the field of medical big data, and not only provide insights into research focus and research fronts from the angle of informatics, but also serve as important indicators for government policymaking.