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The growing use of information and communication technology has now expanded to health professionals in practice. This study aimed to highlight the current status of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) use in health sciences as reported in journal papers between 2002 and 2021. This paper presents the annual trends, top institutes and countries, citations, h-index, keywords distribution, and top authors in this research domain. The data were extracted from the Web of Science database, and R studio and Bibexcel tools were used for analysis. The study analyzed a total of 140 documents published over a span of two decades. Health Care Sciences Services (34) and Computer Science published the most health science articles (29). The USA (19) was the most productive country, followed by England (16) and the Netherlands (15). Berg M was the most productive author, with 36 articles. The results show that institutions such as Erasmus University and Duke University have published numerous articles on the topic, encouraged by specific R&D funding schemes, and made a significant contribution to the development of health sciences research. The findings of this study offer valuable information about international initiatives and projects relevant to the advancement of ICT in health science research, which may be utilized to pinpoint potential future study topics such as artificial intelligence development.
Keywords: ICT, health science, scientometric, citation, h-indexGustav Wagner (Germany) established the first professional association for health information in 1949 [1]. Health informatics, often known as health information systems, is a field that combines information sciences, computer science, and medicine. It is concerned with the resources, technologies, and procedures needed to optimize information acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use in health and biomedicine [2].
Health science is a broad term that encompasses several sub-disciplines that deal with the application of science in health [3]. Health sciences include traditional Western medicine and alternative medicine [4]. Humans have always had to cope with illness; therefore, health sciences have existed since the dawn of humanity. Medicine, nutrition, and other health-related topics and their effects on humans and animals are studied in this discipline (Shilpa et al., 2014).
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is based on the development of digital technologies, databases, and other applications that aim to prevent illness, treat diseases, and manage chronic ailments in individuals and communities. They also provide the capacity for improving system efficiencies and preventing medical errors in health care delivery [5]. Health information technology allows for new and more efficient ways to access, communicate, process, and store data [6].
ICTs allow for remote care, and interdisciplinary clinical and knowledge support. These are all meant to bridge the gap between the health sector and other sectors in both developing and developed countries [7]. Since 2005, the World Health Organization has called on member states to develop “information and ICT infrastructure for health that is deemed appropriate to promote fair, affordable, and universal access to their facilities, and to use the information” and to “continue working with telecommunications companies and other partners to reduce costs and make e-health a success” [8]. Health and Education, Hospital Management Systems, Health Research and Health Data Management are four domains in which ICT is used in health sciences.
Scientometrics is the application of quantitative approaches to scientific communications to quantify the impact of research on society and compare its output and impact at the national and international levels [9]. These include assessing the influence of publications, journals and institutions/universities, deciphering the scientific citations, and mapping the research topics. There have been a variety of scientometric studies, many of which are based on the research output of countries and institutions. Several scientometric studies have been conducted with certain publications being selected and others, such as book reviews, editorial books, and conferences, being excluded.
This research is a scientometric analysis of the global research output on ICT usage in health sciences, published between 2002–2021. Publications were examined in terms of publication year, document categories, prolific authors, sources, institutions, and countries.
Sood and Rawat highlighted the results of a scientometric examination of research conducted on disaster management employing ICT. For technical developments in ICT-assisted disaster management research, the growth of publications, citation analysis, collaborations, and keyword co-occurrence analysis was conducted. The results identified the lists of important publications, countries, and institutions that have made substantial contributions to this field of study. This study provided a foundation for future research on this topic by presenting the evidence of diverse patterns, research trends, and collaborations in the research domain [10].
Vaquero-álvarez et al., conducted a bibliometric study in the healthcare sector. The major goal of the research was to focus on articles from the past 30 years on technology and workplace safety in the healthcare industry. The 1021 documents that were analyzed in the study demonstrated a growing trend by country, especially in the USA, and by year The analysis of journal co-citations found that major journals such as Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology were linked to other important journals and played a key role in cluster formation [11].
Zonneveld et al., conducted research on ICT in healthcare. They used databases such as MEDLINE, CINAHL, and the Cochrane Library for data collection. A total of eleven studies were identified. It was found that videoconferencing applications and the telephone were the most widely used technologies. In ten of the eleven studies, there was a change in participation in everyday life. Participation was primarily defined as being involved in everyday life circumstances or activities [12].
Gaffar et al., evaluated publications on tourism indexed in the Web of Science from 2015 to 2019. A total of 16,941 numbers of records were retrieved for the study. The researchers analyzed various aspects of the publications such as year-based distribution of publications, document types, language-based distribution, country-based distribution, institution-based publications, and author-based publications based on the research objectives. The study also analyzed the highest and lowest records of the different aspects of the tourism literature published during the study period [13].
Bm and Gupta studied 1030 global publications on thalassemia research indexed in the Scopus database. The researchers investigated their growth rate, global share, quote effect, international collaborative document share, publication distribution by broad subject, productivity, top organizations, top authors’ citation profiles, preferred media of communication, and bibliographic characteristics of the highly cited papers [14].
Krishnamoorthy and Amudhavalli examined three decades of publications in health sciences published between 1970 and 2000 in India. The top three sub-disciplines identified were general medicine, pharmacology, and biochemistry. Among the top three sub-disciplines, organic chemistry led the way because of India’s R&D focus on organic chemistry with Artificial Intelligence (AI) 136, compared to general medicine (AI = 109) and pharmacology (AI = 87). However, the literature published on general medicine in India, at 6016publications, was significantly more than on biochemistry, with 1091 [15].
This study aimed to analyze research on ICT use in health science. The main objectives of the research study were:
To find out the growth of publications with citations;
To determine the most productive authors;
To highlight the specific areas of research;
To determine which institutions were the most productive;
To identify the most prolific authors and their institutions.
The information was gathered using the Web of Science Database ( Figure 1 ). Publications on the topic of ICT use in health science research published from around the world during the 2002 to 2021 period were retrieved. Various search strategies were developed and combined with the main search phrase to produce papers that could be used to evaluate data regarding countries, organizations, authors, sources, etc. [16]. The data were extracted from the WoS international database using the keywords “ICT” and “health science” for publications on ICT in health science research published from 2002 to 2021. A total of 140 records were downloaded and analyzed by using R Studio and Bibexcel software based on the study objectives.