Mapping of Knowledge Structure in the Field of Health Information Management and Technology: A Co-Word Analysis

Identifying the knowledge structure and mapping the roadmap in different areas of human knowledge can demonstrate the direction of researchers' progress for future studies. This research tries to reveal the intellectual structure of knowledge in health information management and technology, using network analysis, and science visualization tools.

This is an applied research which had done by co-word analysis. The population of this study consists of 35914 records indexed in Web of Science (WoS) in the period 2007-2016. For careful examination, the mentioned interval is divided into two five-year periods (2007–2011 and 2012–2016). All retrieved records in this study were incorporated into the study and no sampling was used.

The results indicated that in the first five-year period the co-words "E-Health and Telemedicine", and in the second five-year period the co-words "Computers and Medical Records" had the most occurrence. The results of hierarchical clustering led to the formation of eight thematic clusters in the first period and five thematic clusters in the second period. The themes of these clusters are: text mining, personal health, health information, medical information, quality of life, medical imaging, public health, medical education, health care, feature selection, medical information provision, and simulation.

Topics such as simulation, medical imaging, and medical information provision have received less attention from the authors. These results indicate that the research fronts have tended to focus on educational and public health issues.