2.1 Data source

to a certain subject. It is an application area where many subjects are associated such as clinical informatics, health informatics, electronic health record, consumer health

According to Faber, Mitchell coined the term E-health in 1999 [9]. The study of

informatics, and various Internet-based technologies and services [8].

a country.

Scientometrics Recent Advances

Figure 1.

68

Flow chart of the literature.

E-health has attracted research interest after it was used by the World Health Organization (WHO) [10]. First, some researchers raise the theory that E-health communication may have immense potential to promote behavior changes through unique features such as mass customization, interactivity, and convenience. As a result, it can help improve the quality of medical care and lower the cost [11, 12]. On the basis of these theories, many researches have been conducted to confirm the advantages and benefits of E-health, such as "automatic-sleep classification program" research and "E-health intervention model designing" [13, 14], challenges in establishing a national databank of anonymized person-based records, and randomized controlled trial of web-guided approach [15–17]. Published articles in related fields are on the rise year by year (Figure 1), and many countries have also raised programs, Europe "e-Health Action Plan 2004–2010" and "e-Health Action Plan 2012–2020" and the USA "Federal Health IT Strategic Plan (2015–2020)," on the development of health information systems. The United Kingdom "Health and Social Care Act 2012" proposed that we need to reform healthcare and take the advantage of information technologies to improve the quality of patient care [18–20]. It informs us that combining health work with ICT is the trend of medicine development since medicine and health are the basis of stable development for

As for E-health researches, there are several main topics: (1) Consensus and standardization of E-health research. (2) Evaluation methods and challenges proper evaluation methods are needed to establish E-health quality and efficiency evaluation model [21, 22]. (3) Quality, value, and future trends—as most people

Web of Science core collection is used as data sources. We summarized the scope of E-health, and developed the following search query according to the results of literature research (Table 1). We selected the search term to retrieve all relevant literatures for 15 years, and 6371 documents were retrieved in total.



annual growth rate of 29.93% from 2001 to 2016. In detail, we saw two inflection points in 2005 and 2010. Considering the quantity and proportion trend of the literature, we divided the whole research time into three parts which are listed as

Detection and Characterization of E-Health Research: A Bibliometrics (2001–2016)

Reasons for the above trend have two aspects. First, they are associated with some pivotal view point. Eysenbach, G and WEBB, TL published their important literature in 2005 and 2010. They are both authorities in E-health research [7, 34]. Therefore, the quantity of published literature began to rise in these years. Second, developing technology and government attaching importance to medical research contributed a lot. The development of E-health depended on science and technology progress. Many governments have different preferential policies for health science research and Internet communication techniques which promoted E-health research.

Figure 3 shows the published number of key nodes and the influence degree of

relevant researchers concretely. Centrality is an index used to measure the

2001–2005, 2006–2010, and 2011–2016.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.88610

The number of articles published each year.

3.1.2 Country analysis

Figure 2.

Figure 3.

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Visualization map of countries.

Table 1. Search query for this study.

## 2.2 Methods and tools

Information visualization is an analytical method which can realize the interactive visualization analysis on abstract data and enhance people's perception of the abstract information [30]. To some extent, information visualization offers a quick independent, scientific judgment of the objective evidences [31]. CiteSpace, UCINET, Pajek, His cite, and Ref Viez 3 are software that researchers used mostly to do information visualization analysis, among which CiteSpace is the most popular one [32, 33]. CiteSpace, a Java-based application developed by Chaomei Chen professor who is a Changjiang Scholar from Dalian University of Technology, can display the abstracted data in the visual form and facilitates further data analysis, rule discovery, and decision-making. It is easy to use and its visualization results are excellent. In this paper, we determined the discipline layout and hot spots about E-health in a specific period based on SCI and CiteSpace.
