Abstract
Bioinformatics is a multidisciplinary and comparatively new area of science that has made a significant impact within a short period. A systematic analysis of the rise in bioinformatics literature is, however, not available. This study analyses the growth of the scientific literature in this area as available from NCBI PubMed using standard bibliometric techniques. Bradford’s law of scattering was used to identify core journals and Lotka’s law employed to analyze author’s productivity pattern. Study also explored publication type, language and the country of publication. Twenty core journals were identified and the primary mode of dissemination of information was through journal articles. Authors with single publication were more predominant (73.58%) contrary to that predicted by Lotka’s law. The study provides useful information to scientists wishing to undertake work in this area.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bradford, S. C. (1934), Sources of information on specific subjects. Engineering:An Illustrated Weekly, 137: 3550, 85–86.
Brooks B. C. (1968), The derivation and application of the Bradford-Zipf distribution, Journal of Documentation, 24: 247–265.
Brooks, B. C. (1969), Bradford’s Law and the bibliography of science, Nature, 224: 953–956.
Fang, P. H., Fang, J. M. (1995), A modification of Lotka’s function for scientific productivity, Information Processing and Management, 31: 133–137.
Kawamura, M., Thomas, C. D., Kawaguchi, Y., Sasahara, H. (1999), Lotka’s law and the pattern of scientific productivity in the dental science literature. Medical Informatics and the Internet in Medicine, Oct–Dec, 24: 309–315.
Lancaster, F. W., (1986), Vocabulary Control for Information Retrieval, 2nd ed. Arlington, VA.: Information Resources.
Lotka, A. J. (1926), The frequency distribution of scientific productivity, Journal of the Washington Academy of Science, 16: 317–323.
Newby G. B., Greenberg J., Jones P. (2003), Open source software development and Lotka’s Law: bibliometric pattern in programming, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 54: 169–172.
Nichols, P. T. (1986), Empirical validation of Lotka’s law. Information Processing and Management, 22: 417–419.
Pao, M. L. (1985), Lotka’s Law: A testing procedure. Information Processing and Management, 21: 305–320.
Pritchard, A. (1969), Statistical bibliography or bibliometric. Journal of Documentation, 25: 348–349.
Pulgarin, A., Gil-Levia, I. (2004), Bibliometric analysis of the automatic indexing literature: 1956–2000. Information Processing and Management, 40: 365–377.
Sittig, D. F. (1996), Identifying a core set of medical informatics serials: an analysis using the MEDLINE database, Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, 84: 200–204.
Tsay, M. T., Jou, S. J., Ma, S. S. (2000), A Bibliometric study of semiconductor literature, 1978–1997 Scientometrics, 49: 491–509.
Tsay, M. Y. (2004), Literature growth, journal characteristics, and author productivity in subject indexing, 1997 to 2000, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55: 64–73.
Ungern-Sternberg, S. V. (2000), Bradford’s law in context of information provision. Scientometrics, 49: 161–186.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Patra, S.K., Mishra, S. Bibliometric study of bioinformatics literature. Scientometrics 67, 477–489 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1556/Scient.67.2006.3.9
Received:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1556/Scient.67.2006.3.9