Citation analysis of the prognosis of Haux et al. for the year 2013.

In 2002, Haux, Ammenwerth, Herzog, and Knaup published a prognosis about health care in the information society. In contrast to other prognoses, they underpinned their 30 theses with 71 quantitative statements that could be easily checked. A citation analysis was performed to assess the perception of this work in the medical informatics community. The ISI Web of Science was used for the citation search. From 55 hits, 38 articles were finally included in the metadata analysis, 33 articles in the qualitative analysis. The most prominent statement citing the paper of Haux et al. was identified in each article, divided into statements about the present and those about the future. Each statement was tagged with one keyword out of a convenient list. One article provided a statement about the present and the future. Most of the references were published in English as journal articles between 2006 and 2009. The majority of the first authors were from Europe. Twenty-two articles offered a statement about the present, 12 about the future. There was a shift from the present emphasis on electronic medical records and information and communication technologies to challenges in the future because of an aging population and the advent of personalized medicine. The citing papers seemed to be representative of medical informatics in terms of journals and the authors' countries of origin. The statements relating the citing literature with the paper of Haux et al. corresponded well with current notions about medical informatics. However, there was no debate about the concrete theses and prognoses offered in the cited paper. Therefore, the medical informatics community needs to rethink its own citation strategy.