Summary
Background: In the past decade, Medical Informatics (MI) and Bioinformatics (BI) have converged
towards a new discipline, called Biomedical Informatics (BMI) bridging informatics
methods across the spectrum from genomic research to personalized medicine and global
healthcare. This convergence still raises challenging research questions which are
being addressed by researchers internationally, which in turn raises the question
of how biomedical informatics publications reflect the contributions from around the
world in documenting the research.
Objectives: To analyse the worldwide participation of biomedical informatics researchers from
professional groups and societies in the best-known scientific conferences in the
field. The analysis is focused on their geographical affiliation, but also includes
other features, such as the impact and recognition of the conferences.
Methods: We manually collected data about authors of papers presented at three major MI conferences:
Medinfo, MIE and the AMIA symposium. In addition, we collected data from a BI conference,
ISMB, as a comparison. Finally, we analyzed the impact and recognition of these conferences
within their scientific contexts.
Results: Data indicate a predominance of local authors at the regional conferences (AMIA and
MIE), whereas other conferences with a worldwide scope (Medinfo and ISMB) had broader
participation. Our analysis shows that the influence of these conferences beyond the
discipline remains somewhat limited.
Conclusions: Our results suggest that for BMI to be recognized as a broad discipline, both in
the geographical and scientific sense, it will need to extend the scope of collaborations
and their interdisciplinary impacts worldwide.
Keywords
Biomedical informatics - medical informatics - bioinformatics - conference rankings
- journal impact factor
