Visual exploration of landmarks and trends in the medical informatics literature.

This study presents preliminary results from a visual study of a new dataset of forty years of citation data from publications of twelve journals in the medical informatics field covering the time period from 1964-2004. Highly cited and pivotal documents, areas of specialization within medical informatics, and emergence of research topics are visually mapped through a progressive knowledge domain visualization approach to detecting and visualizing trends and patterns in scientific literature.