Quantifying the Literature on Bioinformatics Research during 1991 to 2003 Ming-Yao Chen#, Wen-Ta Chiu and Yuh-Shan Ho* Taipei Medical University - Wan-Fang Hospital Introduction Bioinformatics, a cross-disciplinary science of incorporating the techniques of computer science and mathematical or statistical methods, aims to manage, analyze, and interpret explosive growth data in biology. During the last decade, bioinformatics has been recognized as a major field of scientific research. Our purpose was to study bioinformatics research performance based on 2695 papers published in SCI-indexed periodicals between 1991 and 2003. These documents were analyzed and evaluated according to the publication distribution and were used to determine the quantitative characteristics of bioinformatics research. Methods Documents used in this study were based on the database of the SCI which was accessed from the ISI Web of Science, Philadelphia, PA, USA. ‘Bioinformatic, bioinformatics, bioinformation, bioinformative, bioinformatical, bioinformaties, bioinformaticist, bioinformaticians, bioinformatically, bioinformaticists, bioinformatique, bioinformational, bioinformaticd, bioinformatian, bioinformatik, bioinformatician, and bioinformatica’ were used as keywords to search titles, abstracts, and key words. Results Table 1. The 30 most productive country between 1991 and 2003 P, total publications; IP, single-country publications; CP, international collaborative publications Figure 1. Relationship between cumulative number of publications and year Figure 2. Relationship between the cumulative percentage of publications and the number of countries involved Conclusions Bioinformatics research publications showed a high rate of increase in the last 10 years. More document types have appeared in bioinformatics research compared with other research fields. English remains the dominant language. Small-group collaboration was a popular method of co-authorship. The top 3 ranking countries of publication were the US, the UK, and Germany. The most-frequently cited article was published in Nature, which is the highest impact factor journal in the category of multidisciplinary sciences. Simulation models were successfully applied to describe the relationship between the yearly cumulative number of publications and the year published, as well as the cumulative percentage of publications and the number of countries involved. Table 2. The 3 journals with the most publications including the impact factor (IF), the ISI category of the journal, the position of the journal in its category, the number (P) of papers, and the percentage (%) of total documents