Bibliometric analysis of the International Medical Informatics Association official journals

Objectives: This research article aims to analyze the bibliometric characteristics of four official International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) journals, namely: the International Journal of Medical Informatics, Methods of Information in Medicine, Applied Clinical Informatics, and Informatics for Health and Social Care. Method: We used descriptive bibliometrics to study the trends of literature production, identify documents` types, most prolific authors, institutions, countries, and most cited publications of all four IMIA journals. Additionally, we visualized the content of published publications using bibliometric mapping to identify journals? main themes and the most prolific and most cited research terms. Results: In total, 6,837 publications were published in all four IMIA journals. Among them, there were 5,137 original articles, meaning that articles were the leading document type. Research is being conducted globally among various research institutions. The most prolific countries are the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and Canada. Thematic analyses of clusters show that themes are overlapping between all four journals. Conclusion: The journals contribute to the advances in technology related to health information systems, knowledge-based and decision-making systems, health literacy, and electronic health records.