Objective Based on evidence-based medicine systematic research and literature analysis methods, to make a quantitative and qualitative analysis on Chinese and No-Chinese literatures with subject of Medical Ethics. Concise and analyze the law and trends of subject development, to provide baseline data and decision-making reference for the relevant decision-making and follow-up study. Method We analyzed keywords in medical ethics articles in PubMed and CNKI database, and developed subject charts, research field relationship charts, and strategy coordination charts using word co-occurrence, PFNET algorithms, and visualization methods. Result Literatures collected from PubMed is six times than that from CNKI. Medical ethics research in China, starting later than abroad almost 35 years, is still at the preliminary stage of development. Eight matured research fields are formed as Morals, Ethical review, Physician-Patient relations, clinical trial, euthanasia, medical ethics education, clinical ethics, and health policy outside of China. Comparatively, in China there are only five fields are developed such as Morals, Physician-Patient relations, medical ethics education, bioethics, and medical research. Conclusion Foreign countries more focus on how to employ medical ethics to solve new problems occurred in clinics and medical research, with morals, ethical review, and Physician-Patient relations as the center of research net. Researchers in China pay more attentions on morals and education with morals as the only research net center. So an urgent need is called to make a transition from simply moral research into applied research stressing on both moral education and ethic review.
Objective To use visualization methods to illustrate and compare major subjects, domains, and developments in evidence-based medicine (EBM) in recent years. Methods We analyzed MeSH terms and keywords in EBM articles in the MEDLINE and CNKI databases, and developed subject charts, research field relationship charts, and strategy coordination charts using word co-occurrence, PFNET algorithms, and visualization methods. Results Rapid developments and growth are taking place in EBM in China and around the world. Studies on humans comprised 94.4% of the EBM studies that we identified, while animal studies accounted for 2.6% (three quarters of these animal studies were on primates). The six countries with the largest number of EBM articles and the eight host nations for the 108 journals with the most EBM publications were from high-income countries. In China, 31 provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions have published EBM articles, although most of these publications come from the more highly-developed areas of the country. The investigation of word co-occurrence showed that EBM articles outside of China involve seven main fields: “Therapy”, “Methods”, “Standards”, “Research”, “Education”, ”Nursing” and “Organization and Administration”. Five of these fields (“Therapy”, “Nursing”, “Research”, “Education” and “Management”) were common to China but the top seven fields for this country included “Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)” and “Information resources”; and did not include “Methods” and “Standards”. Furthermore, studies on “Nursing” and “Research” were not as advanced in China as in other countries. Conclusion There are similarities between China and the rest of the world in several areas in the EBM literature but also some important differences. Throughout the world, the most resource-rich regions or organizations tend to have the most well-developed EBM. These regions and organizations are producing more evidence and conducting more methodology research than the less resourced regions and organizations. There is an urgent need for these regions and organizations to strengthen their use of evidence, to learn more about the philosophy that underpins EBM, and to improve accessibility to, and use of, evidence in choices about health care.
Objective To investigate the output of evidence-based medicine (EBM) researchers in China and elsewhere by examining the EBM domains they work within and the networks that exist among them; using visualization methods to analyze these relationships. This maps the current situation and helps with the identification of areas for future growth. Method We used co-citation matrixes with Pathfinder networks and hierarchical clustering algorithms, and constructed a co-author matrix which were analyzed with a whole network approach. The analyzed matrixes were visualized with the UCINET program. Result Much of the development of EBM has been centered around three authors, David Sackett, Gordon Guyatt and L Manchikanti, within three different clusters. The main authors of EBM articles in China were divided into nine academic domains. The relations among core authors of articles indexed by the Science Citation Index (SCI) was loose. There was a ber co-authorship network among core authors in the Chinese literature, with three groups and 21 cliques. Nine distinct academic communities appeared to have formed around Li Youping, Liu Ming and Zhang Mingming. Conclusion The EBM literature contains several key clusters, with universities in high-income countries being the source of the majority of articles. Outside China, McMaster University in Canada, the original home of EBM, is the dominant producer of EBM publications. In China, Sichuan University is the main source of EBM publications. The EBM cooperation network in China is comprised of three major groups, the largest and most productive in this sample is led by Li Youping with Liu Ming, Zhang Mingming, Li Jing, Wang Li, Wu Taixiang, and Liu Guanjian as central members.
ObjectiveTo analyze publications of the application of artificial intelligence related methods in medicine.MethodsPubMed and EMbase databases were electronically searched. Pathfinder Networks (PFNETs) algorithm, co-word network analysis and visualization technology were applied to analyze the time trend, journal distribution, and co-word structure of high-frequency medical keywords in key journals.ResultsThe amount of literature published on the application of artificial intelligence related methods in the medical field had been increasing annually. Nowadays, the number of studies published in the United States was the largest, and that in China, it was the sixth (first in developing countries). The number of the first author from the United States or China were among the top two, which were significantly more than any other regions. In 2012, IEEE Trans Neural Netw Learn Syst in the computer field became one of the major contributing journals. In recent years, the methods and applications proposed in the medical field were closely related to natural language processing, neural networks, and support vector machines.ConclusionsAt present, the United States is in a leading position in terms of artificial intelligence in medicine, and China has also abundant research strength. The number of medical literature published in interdisciplinary journals is increasing gradually, showing that the research and application of artificial intelligence related methods in medicine have become a research hotspot in recent years.
Objective To identify patterns in information sharing between a series of Chinese evidence based medicine (EBM) journals and the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, to determine key evidence dissemination areas for EBM and to provide a scientific basis for improving the dissemination of EBM research. Method Data were collected on citing and cited from the Chinese Journal of Evidence-Based Medicine (CJEBM), Journal of Evidence-Based Medicine (JEBMc), Chinese Journal of Evidence Based Pediatrics (CJEBP), and the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR). Relationships between citations were visualized. High-frequency key words from these sources were identified, to build a word co-occurrence matrix and to map research subjects. Result CDSR contains a large collection of information of relevance to EBM and its contents are widely cited across many journals, suggesting a well-developed citation environment. The content and citation of the Chinese journals have been increasing in recent years. However, their citation environments are much less developed, and there is a wide variation in the breadth and strength of their knowledge communication, with the ranking from highest to lowest being CJEBM, JEBMc and CJEBP. The content of CDSR is almost exclusively Cochrane intervention reviews examining the effects of healthcare interventions, so it’s contribution to EBM is mostly in disease control and treatment. On the other hand, the Chinese journals on evidence-based medicine and practice focused more on areas such as education and research, design and quality of clinical trials, evidence based policymaking, evidence based clinical practice, tumor treatment, and pediatrics. Conclusion Knowledge and findings of EBM are widely communicated and disseminated. However, citation environments and range of knowledge communication differ greatly between the journals examined in this study. This finds that Chinese EBM has focused mainly on clinical medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine, pediatrics, tumor treatment, nursing, health economic and management, and medical education. Internationally, EBM research topics have begun to shift, from drug treatment to surgery or other non-pharmacological treatments; from therapy to diagnosis, rehabilitation, and prevention; from evidence based clinical practice to evidence based management and policymaking. The philosophy and method of EBM, evidence production and translation are also shifting from well resourced settings to low- and middle-income countries, especially those in which English is not a major language.