Bibliometric study of bioinformatics literature

Bioinformatics is a multidisciplinary and comparatively new area of science that has made a significant impact within a short period. A systematic analysis of the rise in bioinformatics literature is, however, not available. This study analyses the growth of the scientific literature in this area as available from NCBI PubMed using standard bibliometric techniques. Bradford's law of scattering was used to identify core journals and Lotka's law employed to analyze author's productivity pattern. Study also explored publication type, language and the country of publication. Twenty core journals were identified and the primary mode of dissemination of information was through journal articles. Authors with single publication were more predominant (73.58%) contrary to that predicted by Lotka's law. The study provides useful information to scientists wishing to undertake work in this area.