The Evolving Intellectual Structure of the Health Informatics Discipline: A Multi-Method Investigation of a Rapidly-Growing Scientific Field

Abstract

Scientific disciplines are self-defined and self-evolving to a large extent, but acknowledging that disciplines develop organically does not diminish the continuing need to more fully understand the underlying dynamics of their intellectual structures. Intellectual structures bespeak the topics (including paradigms) that a discipline selects, the sub-disciplines and sub-communities that emerge, the thought leaders who direct the efforts of its various research programs, and the relationships between these various structural components. One such discipline, the discipline of health informatics (HI), is not only a vitally important discipline for societies worldwide, but is also an enormous field that manifests itself in the natural and social sciences as well as in the management sciences and applied disciplines including professionals such as physicians, nurses, paramedics, and so forth.A subset of the HI field especially important to management scholars is identified here as health information technology (HIT). The current study analyzes the intellectual underpinnings of the field of HI and, in particular, focuses on its sub-discipline HIT. Using the multiple statistical methods including citation and co-citation analysis, social network analysis (SNA), and latent semantic analysis (LSA), we show how HIT research has emerged in management journals and distinguished itself from the larger HI context. The research themes, intellectual leadership, cohesion of these themes and networks of researchers, and journal presence revealed in our longitudinal intellectual structure analyses foretells how, in particular, these HI and HIT fields have evolved to date and also how they could evolve in the future. Our findings identify which research streams are central (versus peripheral) and which are cohesive (as opposed to disparate). Suggestions for vibrant areas of future research emerge from our analyses.