A data-driven method for research trend analysis in a scientific discipline: Application to the journal of biomedical informatics

Objective Accurately characterizing research trends is critical for identifying cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs in their infancy and informing strategic priorities. This research contributes a pipeline that utilizes generative AI technologies to develop research topic taxonomies from publication keywords and analyze keyword evolution within topics, methodological and domain trends, and topic co-occurrences. We demonstrated the pipeline by conducting a retrospective analysis of biomedical informatics research trends in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics (JBI) . Methods We identified the JBI publications with keywords available on PubMed, spanning 2011–2025. We downloaded all the keywords and categorized them into methodological innovations and health domains, identified topics, assigned topic names, and constructed their hierarchies, all using large-language models (LLMs). We introduced an automated method for evaluating topics, leveraging MeSH terminology as the underlying knowledge base. Results Using 6,930 unique keywords from 2,427 publications, we derived 1,028 distinct topics related to methodological innovations, with each topic associated with medians of four keywords (Q1: 2, Q3: 13) and six publications (Q1: 2, Q3: 19). We identified 904 topics related to health domains, with each topic associated with three keywords (Q1: 1, Q3: 11) and four publications (Q1: 1, Q3: 15). Based on the topics, we analyzed the prominent research areas, trends in publication volume, evolution of keyword distributions within each topic, and patterns of co-occurring topics. Among the 2,379 eligible publications, 2,009 (84.4%) exhibited overlap between the keyword-derived MeSH terms and the MeSH terms assigned to the publication by the National Library of Medicine. Conclusion This study presents a method that leverages modern generative AI technologies for retrospective analysis of a scientific field to identify emerging topics and to detect shifts in scholarly focus. Illustrated by data for JBI and correlated with historical background events and policy changes, our findings demonstrate the effectiveness and utility of the methods while providing a powerful lens to understand the evolution of biomedical informatics research priorities in JBI.