Abstract

This study aims to identify and comprehensively view health information-related research trends using a bibliometric analysis. To this end, 1,193 papers from 2002 to 2023 related to “health information” were collected through the Korea Citation Index (KCI) database and analyzed in diverse aspects: research trends by period, academic fields, intellectual structure, and keyword changes. Results indicated that the number of papers related to health information continued to increase and has been decreasing since 2021. The main academic fields of health information-related research included “biomedical engineering,” “preventive medicine/occupational environmental medicine,” “law,” “nursing,” “library and information science,” and “interdisciplinary research.” Moreover, a co-word analysis was performed to understand the intellectual structure of research related to health information. As a result of applying the parallel nearest neighbor clustering (PNNC) algorithm to identify the structure and cluster of the derived network, four clusters and 17 subgroups belonging to them could be identified, centering on two conglomerates: “medical engineering perspective on health information” and “social science perspective on health information.” An inflection point analysis was attempted to track the timing of change in the academic field and keywords, and common changes were observed between 2010 and 2011. Finally, a strategy diagram was derived through the average publication year and word frequency, and high-frequency keywords were presented by dividing them into “promising,” “growth,” and “mature.” Unlike previous studies that mainly focused on content analysis, this study is meaningful in that it viewed the research area related to health information from an integrated perspective using various bibliometric methods.