JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Due to the widespread and unprecedented popularity of mobile phones, the use of mobile health applications has seen significant growth. Mobile health applications have tremendous potential for monitoring and treating diseases, improving patient care, and promoting health.

Objective:

To explore research trends, co-authorship networks and the research hot spots of mobile health application research.

Methods:

Publications related to mobile health applications were retrieved and extracted from the Web of Science (WOS) database with no language restrictions. We used the bibliographic items co-occurrence matrix builder (BICOMB) to extract bibliographic information (publication year and journal source) and perform a descriptive analysis. We then used the VOSviewer tool to construct and visualize the co-occurrence networks of researchers, research institutions, countries/regions, citations and keywords.

Results:

We retrieved 2802 research papers on mobile health applications published from 2000 to 2019. The number of annual publications increased over the past 19 years. JMIR mHealth and uHealth (323, 11.50%), Journal of Medical Internet Research (106, 3.78%) and JMIR Research Protocols (82, 2.92%) were the preferred journals for publication. The USA (1186, 42.24%), England (235, 8.37%), Australia (215, 7.66%) and Canada (112, 4.78%) were the most productive countries of origin. The University of California San Francisco, the University of Washington and the University of Toronto were the most productive institutions. With regard to the authors’ contributions, Schnall R, Kuhn E, Lopez-Coronado M and Kim J are the most active researchers. The Co-occurrence Cluster Analysis of the top100 keywords forms 5 clusters: (1) The technology and system development of mobile health applications; (2) Mobile health applications for mental health; (3) Mobile health applications in telemedicine, chronic disease and medication adherence management; (4) Mobile health applications in health behavior and health promotion; (5) Mobile health applications in disease prevention via the Internet.

Conclusions:

We summarize the recent advances in mobile health application research and shed light on their research frontier, trends and hot topics through bibliometric analysis and network visualization. These findings may provide valuable guidance on future research directions and perspectives in this rapidly developing field.