Trends and Visibility of “Digital Health” as a Keyword in Articles by JMIR Publications in the New Millennium: Bibliographic-Bibliometric Analysis

Background

Digital health has become an advancing phenomenon in the health care systems of modern societies [1]. As a keyword, the US Food and Drug Administration defines “digital health” as “a broad scope which includes mobile health (mHealth), health information technology, wearable devices, telehealth and telemedicine, and personalized medicine” [2]. Of note, it is the increasing adoption of “digital health” as a specific keyword, which has shown itself in the utilization of the term by international organizations, such as the World Health Organization [3,4].

Globally, many academics and researchers are increasingly being involved in doing research on, utilizing, evaluating, or taking advantage of the benefits of digital health and its various related technologies for their studies on individuals, populations, or health organizations. This increasing involvement has reflected itself in the utilization of “digital health” as a keyword in published peer-reviewed literature. More specifically, in the past two decades, a growing number and diversity of research projects, study protocols, publications, and dedicated journals have played important roles in the digital health domain [5]. In addition, the empowerment of health care system clients, including patients, and the progressive desire for innovation by industries and enterprises [6] have continued to reinforce the need for valid and trustworthy scientific evidence on digital health for the benefit of public health.

Over the past two decades, various digital health options, technologies, and innovations have been introduced; many of them are still being investigated and evaluated by researchers all around the globe [7]. These research endeavors typically reflect themselves in peer-reviewed publications of various kinds. However, the actual trends and visibility of those publications on digital health, published by major relevant journals, still remain to be quantified in detail.

Aims

This study aimed to take a more methodical approach to answering this question, by conducting a bibliographic-bibliometric analysis on the publications focused on using “digital health” as a keyword. We evaluated the trends, topics, and citations of research publications in different journals, with the hope to identify, and ultimately help to increase, the share and contribution of major relevant journals in publishing articles on digital health. Thereafter, for the purpose of providing an unbiased comparison among different journals on the trends and visibility of their publications, we conducted detailed subgroup analyses, individualized to specialized journals or journal publishers. This paper summarizes the specific outcomes of our analyses on articles published by JMIR Publications. The main reasons behind focusing on JMIR Publications in this study are the following: (1) JMIR Publications has been an active publisher in the digital health space since 1999, which overlaps entirely with the intended time frame of our study; (2) it has a collection of correlated journals, which covers diverse aspects of digital health research; and (3) it publishes open-access articles, which gives the authors more chances of visibility and knowledge translation and the readers more chances of verifying the results of all analyses.

Rationale Behind Choosing “Digital Health” as a Keyword

On the basis of expert opinions, “digital health” is considered a relatively new term in research publications, as its appearance as a keyword seems to have increased fairly recently in peer-reviewed articles. Before this trend becomes commonplace, keywords such as “Internet research,” “cybermedicine,” “eHealth,” or “mHealth” have been (and are still being) used by authors and editorial boards of various scientific journals, including journals by JMIR Publications.

To address this recency in the adoption of “digital health” as a more common term, we followed a staged, multistep literature search strategy, implemented separately for each journal or journal group or publisher, to ensure that using “digital health” as an identifying keyword does not harm the inclusiveness of numerous options, technologies, and innovations in this space. An effort was made to find the sensitivity of using “digital health” as a keyword in identifying articles that could have otherwise been classified differently under internet search, cybermedicine, mHealth, or similar keywords had “digital health” not been assigned as a keyword by the authors or the databases.

Literature Search Strategy

The time frame of search was January 2000 to August 2019.

Owing to its open-access nature, we decided to use PubMed database to identify general and specialized journals and find articles published in English language, in which the focus was on using “digital health” as a keyword.

The initial, implicit assumption was that if “digital health” has been mentioned by the authors as a keyword in an article or assigned by the database organizer, for example, as Medical Subject Heading (MeSH)–assigned keyword, the topic of the article will be related to digital health. However, as mentioned above, to reduce the bias in finding relevant articles because of the recency of “digital health” being used as a term, we followed a staged search strategy, which is summarized below.

Bibliographic–Bibliometric Analysis

For bibliographic management and analysis of the references, we used EndNote X8 (Thompson Reuters Inc) software, mainly its “Subject Bibliography” functionality.

For bibliometric analysis to quantify the trends and visibility of published articles using “digital health” as a keyword, we used one of the free, publicly available Web-based solutions, that is, the Profiles Research Networking (PRN) Software by the Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center [9]. The details of the methodology behind this specific solution and the range of services the PRN Software provides are explained on its dedicated website. In brief, we used the “Bibliometric Summary Report” functionality of the PRN Web-based software after (1) extracting the PubMed IDs of all articles found in stage 7 of our search strategy and stored in our EndNote library; (2) pasting the IDs onto the PRN Software’s website (in a dedicated box); (3) getting calculations for common metrics, including citation counts and h-index; and (4) analyzing the report metrics and parameters, as per the PRN Software [9] defined in Table 1.

Overall Findings

Overall, with August 31, 2019 as the last publication date, we found 1797 articles indexed in PubMed, with “digital health” being assigned as one of the keywords in their metadata.

Exporting the keywords from 1797 articles provided a list of 5138 author-assigned and MeSH-assigned keywords, out of which 312 keywords were directly relevant to “digital health” options, technologies, and innovations (Multimedia Appendix 1).

In the same time frame, JMIR Publications had 7556 articles indexed in PubMed, mainly in the Journal of Medical Internet Research and its sister journals. Using OR between the 312 relevant keywords AND JMIR, we were able to identify 7468 (98.8%) of articles by JMIR Publications, an indicator of the high sensitivity of “digital health” as a keyword in an article to represent a diverse range of technologies discussed in their corresponding articles.

Out of the 1797 articles, 277 articles had both characteristics of (1) being published by JMIR Publications and (2) having “digital health” as an assigned keyword. The rest of the bibliographic-bibliometric analysis was performed on these 277 articles.

Bibliographic Analysis

Figure 1 visualizes the temporal trend of the 277 articles published by JMIR Publications in the study’s time frame. A total of 10 journals by JMIR Publications published most of these articles, the top three being the Journal of Medical Internet Research (117/277, 42.2% articles), JMIR mHealth and uHealth (57/277, 20.6%), and JMIR Research Protocols (41/277, 14.8%).

Subject Focus of the Articles

Using EndNote’s Subject Bibliography, a total of 1101 MeSH- and author-assigned keywords were extracted for assessing the topics of articles. Table 2 summarizes the top 30 keywords in the published articles and their corresponding number of appearances.

Bibliometric Analysis

Table 3 summarizes the bibliometric statistics for the published articles having “digital health” as a keyword.

All articles were classified under “medical informatics” as the most frequent field/discipline of focus.

Table 4 summarizes the bibliometric statistics for all articles published between January 2000 and August 2019 by JMIR Publications having “digital health” as a keyword in the study’s time frame (the citation variables have the same meaning as the ones summarized in Table 3).

Table 5 summarizes the yearly cumulative citation statistics for all articles published between January 2000 and August 2019 by JMIR Publications having “digital health” as a keyword (the citation variables have the same meaning as the ones summarized in Tables 2 and 3).

Principal Findings

Both trends and visibility of research publications containing “digital health” in their keywords and published by JMIR Publications journals increased dramatically, especially over the past 2 to 3 years, with more than two-third of the articles being published in 2018 and 2019. This important finding shows how “digital health” is becoming a mainstream theme and an established terminology in peer-reviewed publications.

The Journal of Medical Internet Research had the highest number of articles and longest duration of publication in this time frame, among all the journals of JMIR Publications. This reflects the overall aim and willingness of the editorial board to lead in peer review, and ultimately in the publication, of the manuscripts that are focused on digital health to disseminate their ideas and research results. It may also reflect improvement in the methodologies of the published articles [10], which might have made them strong and robust enough to be accepted for publication in the JMIR Publications journals.

Interestingly, “mHealth” and “mobile health” as specific keywords, appeared in 96 out of 277 articles (34.6%), followed by “Telemedicine” and “Internet,” both appearing in 57 (20.5%) and 42 (15.2%) articles, respectively. In addition, there appeared to be cumulatively repetitive or redundant keywords, either author-assigned or MeSH keywords (eg, “mobile phone,” “smartphone,” “Cell Phone,” “Mobile Applications,” and “mobile apps”), all appearing with different frequencies in collective articles. We decided to present these keywords as raw as possible in Table 2 to show how different some of these keywords still are, in appearing in the topics of research manuscripts. This highlights the fact that the authors and/or manually indexing databases, such as National Library of Medicine (NLM), can take advantage of the conceptual trends and assign more appropriate keywords to improve their accuracies in retrieving and combining relevant search results.

The dramatic increase in the cumulative number of citations over the study years is a helpful indicator of the overall interest in referring to the articles pertaining to the keyword “digital health.” Moreover, an H-index of 12, plus an average number of citations of all articles being >1.6 times more than the expected number of citations, highlights the increasing interest in referring to articles on digital health.

Expectedly, “medical informatics” was found to be the most frequent field/discipline of focus in research publications having “digital health” as a keyword. This finding, in addition to considering the Journal of Medical Internet Research as ranking first in the category “Medical Informatics” in Journal Citations Report, highlights the suitability of this study to be presented to the audiences of the journal.

The Journal of Medical Internet Research and JMIR Research Protocols had the highest ratio of average number of citations (no self-citations) to expected number, matched on journal, year, and publication type (PT). This highlights the higher visibility of research publications in the abovementioned journals.

Increasing the Accuracy of Interpreting Bibliometric Outputs

We followed the hints provided by the PRN Software team [9] to increase the reliability and validity of interpreting the bibliometric outputs:

1. The PRN Software compares the average number of authors per article and the average number of times the articles have been cited with an expected value, which is “the averages of all articles in PubMed, matched on journal and year of publication” [9]. To control for the various PTs (eg, Journal Article, Review, and Editorial), the software also calculates “PT” expected values. As PubMed may assign multiple PTs to the same article, articles are matched on all PTs for calculating the PT expected values.

2. In addition, if self-citations are included in the analysis subsections, they are explicitly being noted.

3. To determine the field/discipline of a specific journal, the NLM assigns Broad Journal Heading values to the journal, which are MeSH terms, summarizing the overall subjects of that journal. Similar to PT, a journal can be assigned to multiple Broad Journal Headings; consequently, a single publication of that journal might be listed more than once in the output tables about filed/discipline, causing the Num Pubs field to add up to more than the total number of publications. This was not the case in our analysis as all the journals by JMIR Publications were classified under Medical Informatics by the NLM.

Limitations

Our study focused on English language–based journals that were indexed in PubMed as a freely available database and published by JMIR Publications. PubMed is not essentially a citation-tracking database. However, solutions such as the bibliometric solution that we used in our methodology, that is, the PRN Software by the Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center, have been developed, which provide bibliometric outputs on PubMed-indexed articles. Other citation-based databases, specifically subscription-based bibliometric databases, such as Scopus and Web of Science, could be included in future research projects to expand the scope of this analysis.

Another main reason behind focusing only on PubMed, apart from being freely available to the public, was that PRN Software only accepts PubMed IDs for citation analysis. This held us back from using other bibliographic databases as they could not have any PubMed ID for non-PubMed-indexed journals.

In addition, the citation metrics by PRN Software were coming from one publicly available free data source and were limited to commonly used parameters. For the provision of a comprehensive bibliometric outlook on publications by JMIR Publications having the keyword “digital health,” other citation databases and metrics could also be utilized in future studies.

Conclusions

The reflection of “digital health” in JMIR Publications journals has been on the rise over the past few years. More comprehensive and comparative bibliographic and bibliometric analyses, with broader ranges of keywords to include eHealth, mHealth, and similar concepts, would be needed to visualize whether “digital health” continues to remain a rising keyword in the future or not.