Mapping the field of Bioinformatics with a content and co-authorship analysis

Bioinformatics is a fast-growing interdisciplinary research field that applies advanced computational techniques to biological data. Bibliometrics analysis has recently been adopted to understand the knowledge structure of a research field by citation pattern. In this paper, we explore the knowledge structure of Bioinformatics from the perspective of a core open access Bioinformatics journal, BMC Bioinformatics with trend analysis, the content and co-authorship network similarity, and principal component analysis. The experimental results show that Bioinformatics is fast-growing, dynamic and diversified. The content analysis shows that there is an increasing overlap among Bioinformatics journals in terms of topics and more research groups participate in researching Bioinformatics according to the co-authorship network similarity.