The triangle of biomedicine framework to analyze the impact of citations on the dissemination of categories in the PubMed database
Gerson Pech, Aleksandra Mreła, Veslava Osińska, Oleksandr Sokołov · Journal of Informetrics · 2025
• The triangle of biomedicine is used to study the dissemination and dynamics of categories. • Translational science study indicates a significant impact of animal and molecular-cellular categories on human science. • Normalized entropy analysis shows most articles from the PubMed human category tend to continue citing this category. • Statistical analysis emphasizes animal as the category with the maximum relative dissemination. Processing scientific literature metadata allows us to verify the assignment of articles to predefined categories. The Triangle of Biomedicine (TB) is a convenient space for considering the positions of biomedical papers according to human, animal, and molecular-cellular subdisciplines. The placement of PubMed papers in the TB using citations and, what is more interesting, the dynamics of the changing positions of papers (because of citations) have not been examined to date. This research presents a method for finding the article citation vectors of directly cited papers whose components are the MeSH terms shares offered by the PubMed database. The citation vectors allow finding the paper's position in the TB and comparing it with the original position of the publication. The analysis of sets of citation vectors enables locating their position on the translational line to show the distance between human research and animal-molecular studies. Moreover, applying information entropy, the dynamics of entropies in four different sets of articles are studied.