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Subfield · Medicine

Health Informatics research

Health Informatics is a subfield of Medicine. Science Explorer counts 42k research works in it since 1954. 9.8% of them reached the world's top 10% most cited for their field and year.

In short: discipline at the intersection of information science, computer science, and health care.

Research works
42k
fractional, since 1954
In the world top 10%
4.1k
per year above
Top-10% rate
9.8%
share of its works in the world top 10%
Topics
1
Growth, 2018-21 → 2022-25
+543%
the tick is no change
Largest producer
United States
38% of the 10 largest, 2022-now
Health Informatics

This ranks research output and citation impact. It says nothing about the quality of diagnosis, treatment or care.

Which countries lead Health Informatics research?

On research quality in 2022-now, the United States, Germany and China rank highest in Health Informatics. By volume, the United States and India publish the most (8.7k and 3.4k works in 2022-now).

By research quality, 2022-now

  1. 1 United States #1 all time 0.91× citation excellence · 1.78× journals · 100% breadth 10.8% top 10% · 6.4k works
  2. 2 Germany #2 all time 1.39× citation excellence · 1.63× journals · 100% breadth 12.7% top 10% · 955 works
  3. 3 China #4 all time 1.22× citation excellence · 0.90× journals · 100% breadth 11.8% top 10% · 2.2k works
  4. 4 United Kingdom #3 all time 1.06× citation excellence · 1.33× journals · 100% breadth 11.5% top 10% · 1.4k works
  5. 5 Netherlands #6 all time 1.32× citation excellence · 1.60× journals · 100% breadth 12.7% top 10% · 317 works
  6. 6 Australia #7 all time 1.28× citation excellence · 1.05× journals · 100% breadth 16.1% top 10% · 636 works
  7. 7 Canada #5 all time 1.07× citation excellence · 1.18× journals · 100% breadth 12.6% top 10% · 698 works
  8. 8 Switzerland 1.22× citation excellence · 1.83× journals · 100% breadth 12.2% top 10% · 217 works
  9. 9 South Korea #8 all time 1.41× citation excellence · 1.11× journals · 100% breadth 13.5% top 10% · 365 works
  10. 10 France #9 all time 1.05× citation excellence · 1.17× journals · 100% breadth 9.1% top 10% · 347 works

The track on each row is that row's top-10% rate. The ranking itself is the quality score, which compares the rate with what each place's own topics predict, adds its share of papers in the Nature Index journals, and counts output and breadth too.

Of 22 countries ranked in Health Informatics. Ranked on the quality score for 2022-now; the bracket is the all-time rank.

All countries ranked in Health Informatics

By volume, 2022-now

  1. 1 United States 8.7k works
  2. 2 India 3.4k works
  3. 3 China 3k works
  4. 4 United Kingdom 1.9k works
  5. 5 Germany 1.3k works
  6. 6 Türkiye 1k works
  7. 7 Canada 927 works
  8. 8 Australia 832 works
  9. 9 Italy 829 works
  10. 10 Indonesia 802 works

How concentrated that is

The same countries as shares of everything the list above accounts for. A node where two countries do two thirds of the work and one spread evenly across twelve read alike as a ranking and not at all alike here.

United States: 38.4%India: 14.9%China: 13.4%United Kingdom: 8.3%6 others listed: 25.1%38%largest
United States8,681 · 38.4%India3,360 · 14.9%China3,021 · 13.4%United Kingdom1,875 · 8.3%6 others listed5,675 · 25.1%

Shares of the rows listed above, not of the whole node.

Which institutions lead Health Informatics research?

Harvard University (United States) ranks first in Health Informatics on research quality in 2022-now, followed by Stanford University and Yale University.

By research quality, 2022-now

  1. 1 Harvard University United States · Cambridge · #1 all time 15.9% top 10% · 224 works
  2. 2 Stanford University United States · Stanford · #2 all time 19.8% top 10% · 123 works
  3. 3 Yale University United States · New Haven 14.9% top 10% · 74 works
  4. 4 Johns Hopkins University United States · Baltimore · #3 all time 15.1% top 10% · 81 works
  5. 5 University of Oxford United Kingdom · Oxford 18.0% top 10% · 61 works
  6. 6 National University of Singapore Singapore · Singapore 20.4% top 10% · 61 works
  7. 7 University of Toronto Canada · Toronto · #4 all time 14.1% top 10% · 110 works
  8. 8 New York University United States · New York 12.2% top 10% · 74 works
  9. 9 University College London United Kingdom · London · #5 all time 12.7% top 10% · 82 works
  10. 10 Mayo Clinic United States · Rochester · #6 all time 12.5% top 10% · 145 works

The track on each row is that row's top-10% rate. The ranking itself is the quality score, which compares the rate with what each place's own topics predict, adds its share of papers in the Nature Index journals, and counts output and breadth too.

Of 14 institutions above the floor of 40 fractional works in Health Informatics.

Top 100 Health Informatics institutions

By volume, 2022-now

  1. 1 Design Intelligence (United States)United States 446 works
  2. 2 Harvard UniversityUnited States 285 works
  3. 3 Mayo ClinicUnited States 184 works
  4. 4 Stanford UniversityUnited States 163 works
  5. 5 University of TorontoCanada 143 works
  6. 6 Johns Hopkins UniversityUnited States 113 works
  7. 7 University College LondonUnited Kingdom 104 works
  8. 8 New York UniversityUnited States 95 works
  9. 9 Yale UniversityUnited States 94 works
  10. 10 University of North Carolina at Chapel HillUnited States 93 works

Who are the leading researchers in Health Informatics?

Counting only their work in Health Informatics, Professor Gary S. Collins, Xiaoxuan Liu and Daniel Shu Wei Ting have the most papers in the world top 10% for their subfield and year beyond the 10% expected.

  1. 1 Professor Gary S. Collins United Kingdom · #7,674 worldwide overall 15.8 of 28 papers here in the top 10%
  2. 2 Xiaoxuan Liu United Kingdom · #31,925 worldwide overall 12.3 of 24 papers here in the top 10%
  3. 3 Daniel Shu Wei Ting Singapore · #2,473 worldwide overall 12.4 of 28 papers here in the top 10%
  4. 4 Eric J. Topol United States · #15,524 worldwide overall 11.2 of 20 papers here in the top 10%
  5. 5 Jakob Nikolas Kather Germany · #3,109 worldwide overall 12.4 of 32 papers here in the top 10%
  6. 6 Alastair Keith Denniston United Kingdom · #35,102 worldwide overall 11.5 of 25 papers here in the top 10%
  7. 7 Nigam Haresh Shah United States · #15,388 worldwide overall 11.3 of 24 papers here in the top 10%
  8. 8 Judy Wawira Gichoya United States · #69,163 worldwide overall 12.5 of 42 papers here in the top 10%
  9. 9 Karel G.M. Moons Netherlands · #7,362 worldwide overall 9.8 of 14 papers here in the top 10%
  10. 10 Daniel Truhn Germany · #94,399 worldwide overall 10.5 of 24 papers here in the top 10%

Ranked on their work in Health Informatics alone: how many more of their papers here reached the world top 10% for their subfield and year than the 10% expected, among 200,323 ranked researchers with a paper here. Each paper counts once, so many strong papers outrank one famous one, and a long record of ordinary papers does not climb. Identities come from OpenAlex author disambiguation, which occasionally merges or splits people.

Top 100 Health Informatics researchers

What are the most cited papers in Health Informatics?

The most cited paper in Health Informatics is "Stop explaining black box machine learning models for high stakes decisions and use interpretable models instead" (Cynthia D Rudin, 2019), with 10,230 citations. Next come "High-performance medicine: the convergence of human and artificial intelligence" (10,125) and "Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Concepts, taxonomies, opportunities and challenges toward responsible AI" (10,008).

Most cited papers
#PaperReleasedCitations
1 Stop explaining black box machine learning models for high stakes decisions and use interpretable models instead Cynthia D Rudin · Nature Machine Intelligence Open access 13 May 2019 10,230
2 High-performance medicine: the convergence of human and artificial intelligence Eric J. Topol · Nature Medicine 28 Dec 2018 10,125
3 Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Concepts, taxonomies, opportunities and challenges toward responsible AI Alejandro Barredo Arrieta, Natalia Díaz-Rodríguez, Javier Del Ser et al. · Information Fusion Open access 26 Dec 2019 10,008
4 BioBERT: a pre-trained biomedical language representation model for biomedical text mining Jinhyuk Lee, Wonjin Yoon, Sungdong Kim et al. · Bioinformatics Open access 5 Sep 2019 7,445
5 Systematic review of research on artificial intelligence applications in higher education – where are the educators? Olaf Zawacki‐Richter, Victoria I. Marín, Melissa Bond et al. · International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education ReviewOpen access 27 Oct 2019 6,707
All 99 most cited papers, with filters and sorting

Where is Health Informatics research done?

The largest centres of Health Informatics research in 2022-now are London (United Kingdom), Beijing (China), Norman (United States) and New York (United States). Among places with at least 20 works in it, it is an unusually large share of all research in Issy-les-Moulineaux and Norman.

Largest cities, 2022-now

  1. 1 LondonUnited Kingdom 585 works
  2. 2 BeijingChina 485 works
  3. 3 NormanUnited States 455 works
  4. 4 New YorkUnited States 452 works
  5. 5 BostonUnited States 295 works
  6. 6 SeoulSouth Korea 279 works
  7. 7 ChennaiIndia 265 works
  8. 8 ShanghaiChina 265 works
  9. 9 TorontoCanada 260 works
  10. 10 SingaporeSingapore 239 works

Where it is the local speciality

  1. Issy-les-MoulineauxFR · 91.4 works104×
  2. NormanUS · 454.9 works41×
← less than its size predicts1×more →

Location quotient: how much more of its research is in Health Informatics than the world average.

See Health Informatics on the map

Health Informatics research by country

The best places for Health Informatics research inside each country, with that country's researchers and world standing.

Where is the best place to study Health Informatics?

Among universities, judged by research, Harvard University, Stanford University and Johns Hopkins University score highest, combining standing in the field's ranking, citation excellence, specialisation, size, growth and international reach. Research strength is one signal when choosing where to study; it does not measure teaching.

0%20%40%mean 17.85%fractional works in this field (log) →share of work in the world top 10% →Stanford UniversityHarvard UniversityJohns Hopkins Univer…University of Toronto
above the meannear itbelow it

One dot per university in the first ten of the table below, at the default weights. The upper left is the interesting corner: small places doing unusually strong work.

Standingthis field's institution ranking, three quarters all time and a quarter 2022-now
50%
Citation excellenceshare of its work in the world top 10%, 2022-now and all time averaged
20%
Specialisationhow much of its work is in this field, counted up to 10× the world share
5%
Sizeits output in this field, on a log scale
15%
Growthoutput growth, counted from -20% to +20%
5%
Internationalshare of its work with a co-author abroad
5%
Each slider sets a weight; the share it gets of the score is beside it.
#UniversityScoreRank in field (all time)Top 10%SpecialisationWorksGrowth
1Harvard UniversityUnited States 85.5#1 (#1)15.8%3.0×285 +217.0%
2Stanford UniversityUnited States 67.4#2 (#2)19.1%3.7×163 +250.9%
3Johns Hopkins UniversityUnited States 50.6#4 (#3)14.4%2.4×112 +334.3%
4University of TorontoCanada 44.5#7 (#4)13.7%2.4×143 +269.6%
5University College LondonUnited Kingdom 37.1#9 (#5)12.9%2.2×104 +331.6%
6National University of SingaporeSingapore 35.3#618.7%2.3×82 +395.7%
7Yale UniversityUnited States 34.7#314.7%2.9×94 +648.0%
8University of OxfordUnited Kingdom 34.0#516.2%1.9×80 +124.4%
9Education University of Hong KongChina 31.4-32.4%5.1×22 -
10University of Hong KongChina 30.9-20.6%2.0×55 +763.7%

Universities only. The score blends standing (50%), citation excellence (20%), size (15%), specialisation (5%), growth (5%), international reach (5%), 2022-now; growth compares 2018-21 with 2022-25 and counts up to +20%, since a jump from a small base is mostly noise. Standing is the score in this field's institution ranking, three quarters over all time and a quarter 2022-now; excellence averages the two windows too. Four years alone undercount fields such as AI, where many conference and arXiv papers from 2022 on carry no affiliation in the data.

Every institution in Health Informatics, country by country

Is Health Informatics research growing?

Output in 2022-2025 was 543% higher than in 2018-2021, peaking in 2025. The fastest-growing topics are Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education.

still counting19801990200020102020
grewheldshrank

The same series as a ribbon: one cell per year, darker for more. The line above answers how much; this answers when.

Its share of all research

Growing output can still be a shrinking share: all of science grows. This is Health Informatics as a percentage of every work published that year, 0.13% in 2024.

still counting0.10%0.20%0.30%Health Informatics0.21% in 202519801990200020102020

Fractional works of Health Informatics over all fractional works that year. How the balance of science has shifted.

How much of it reaches the world top 10%

Year by year.

still counting5%10%15%Health Informatics9.8% in 20252020

Of each year's works in it, the share that reached the world's 10% most cited for their field and year. A field is the world for its own topics, so there is no other line to hold it against.

Which topics inside it are moving

Growth and decline on one axis around a shared zero. Two lists side by side hide the thing that matters: whether the growth dwarfs the decline, or the other way round.

What does Health Informatics include?

Share who leads Health Informatics

Who leads Health Informatics, on Science Explorer

A card with the countries and institutions that lead Health Informatics, for a post or a slide.

Download the card

1200 × 630 PNG, sized for social posts, drawn from the latest snapshot.

The leading institutions' badges6Each links to that institution's page and updates with every snapshot

Discussion

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