A specialized body of telemedicine/telehealth literature has developed in recent years, fueled by research and the development of telemedicine as a field of study.

This bibliometric study examines the publishing and citing patterns of telemedicine literature indexed by the Telemedicine Information Exchange (TIE), an online database maintained by the Telemedicine Research Center (TRC) with major support from the National Library of Medicine. Citation counts in the TIE bibliographic database trace the growth and development of telemedicine literature and identify the most prolific authors. Citation counts in SciSearch(r) cited reference science database indicate the most cited telemedicine journals and authors and are used to compute journal impact factors. Seventy percent of the telemedicine literature was published since 1995; 86 percent was published since 1990. Core telemedicine journals, Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare and Telemedicine Journal, are peer-reviewed, research-oriented, highly cited in SCI(r), and have a high Journal Impact Factor. The most prolific authors are not necessarily the most cited (only 30 percent of top ten most prolific telemedicine authors are also among the top ten most cited in SCI).