Interdisciplinary trends in forensic medicine: a multi-database analysis of highly cited research

Results from Web of Science (WOS)

Among the 46 papers in the field of forensic medicine that ranked in the top 1% of global citations over the past 10 years (as indexed by the WOS database), 45 were interdisciplinary studies, accounting for 97.8%. This finding highlights that forensic medicine has evolved beyond traditional techniques such as bloodstain examination, autopsy, and forensic toxicology. It has now become a comprehensive discipline that relies heavily on clinical medicine, psychiatry, pathology, psychology, and computer science, particularly artificial intelligence and big data [Figure 1 and Table 1].

Figure 1. Top 25 cross-disciplinary topics in WOS high-cited forensic medicine papers (January 2016 - December 2025). The font size and color intensity of each term are proportional to its frequency of occurrence, with larger and darker words indicating higher frequencies. WOS: Web of Science.

Notably, 28 of the 45 interdisciplinary articles (62.2%) involved international cooperation, suggesting that forensic medicine is a highly globalized discipline that relies extensively on transnational collaboration and resource integration. Furthermore, 73.3% of these interdisciplinary publications were contributed by researchers from disciplines other than forensic medicine, indicating that the field has evolved into a highly open, application-oriented hub that attracts expertise and technological innovations from diverse academic areas.

Results from PubMed

Among the 100 most highly cited papers indexed in PubMed over the past decade, 78 employed interdisciplinary research approaches, yielding an interdisciplinary ratio of 78%. Among these, the most extensive intersections were with clinical medicine, the life sciences, and anatomy. Top interdisciplinary subjects among the 78 interdisciplinary literatures in PubMed are presented in Figure 2 and Table 2.

Figure 2. Top 25 cross-disciplinary topics in PubMed high-cited forensic medicine papers (January 2016 - December 2025). The font size and color intensity of each term are proportional to its frequency of occurrence, with larger and darker words indicating higher frequencies.

Among these 78 interdisciplinary papers, 62 are related to forensic medicine, representing 79.5%. This finding clearly demonstrates that interdisciplinary phenomena in the field of forensic medicine have become highly prominent. Notably, 23 of these 78 papers involve international collaboration, accounting for 29.5% of the highly cited papers in interdisciplinary forensic medicine research. This indicates that nearly one-third of the research achievements in this field have transcended national boundaries and entered a more advanced stage of international development.

Results from Chinese academic databases

In parallel with the analysis of the PubMed database, we also searched Chinese academic databases (e.g., Wanfang and CNKI) using the keyword “forensic medicine”. The retrieved literature was sorted by citation count, and the top 100 most cited articles were selected as research objects.

An analysis of these 100 highly cited papers revealed that 58 are interdisciplinary, accounting for 58%. This indicates that interdisciplinary research within forensic medicine in China remains at a high level. Specifically, the cross-application of forensic medicine with basic medicine and clinical medicine is particularly pronounced in Chinese academic databases. A summary of the top 20 disciplines identified among the 58 interdisciplinary papers is presented in Figure 3 and Table 3. Of these, 53 were directly related to forensic medicine, accounting for 91.38% of the total. These findings demonstrate that the interdisciplinary phenomenon has become increasingly prevalent and well-established in the field of forensic medicine in China.

Figure 3. Top 20 cross-disciplinary topics in Chinese academic databases high-cited forensic medicine papers (January 2016 - December 2025). The font size and color intensity of each term are proportional to its frequency of occurrence, with larger and darker words indicating higher frequencies.

Comparison of WOS and PubMed for the top 30 most cited articles

Additionally, we analyzed the top 30 most cited articles in WOS [Figure 4 and Table 4] and PubMed [Figure 5 and Table 5] databases. The results from WOS showed that the top three journals were not traditional forensic medicine journals, indicating that interdisciplinary research has been a prominent trend in forensic medicine over the past decade and is key to achieving high citation counts. The USA demonstrated comprehensive distribution of highly cited studies across impact-factor tiers. The German journal PHARMACOPSYCHIATRY achieved the highest total citations (nearly 1000) despite a low impact factor. Journals including Nature Genetics, British Journal of Sports Medicine, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) combined high impact factors with strong citation performance. China showed positive trends, with publications spanning multiple tiers, including a study in a journal with an impact factor of 39.3, indicating breakthroughs in high-impact forensic medicine research. Collectively, these findings suggest that research impact in interdisciplinary forensic medicine is not solely determined by journal impact factor, and highlight significant variations in research output across countries.

Figure 4. Journal information for the top 30 most cited papers among 45 interdisciplinary publications in the WOS database. WOS: Web of Science.

Figure 5. Journal information for the top 30 most cited papers among 78 interdisciplinary publications in the PubMed database.

Analysis of the PubMed database [Figure 5 and Table 5] reveals a clear dichotomy in the publication patterns of highly cited forensic medicine papers. On one hand, traditional forensic journals such as Forensic Science International (IF 2.5), Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine (IF 1.2), and International Journal of Legal Medicine (IF 2.3) generally have lower impact factors, and papers published in these journals account for a substantial proportion of the highly cited literature from China (e.g., 23, 22, and 21 citations, respectively). On the other hand, interdisciplinary journals with higher impact factors - such as Deutsches Arzteblatt International (IF 7.2, 128 citations, Germany), International Journal of Molecular Sciences (IF 4.9, 45 citations, Poland; 19 citations, China), Biosensors-Basel (IF 5.6, 44 citations, Netherlands), and Journal of Clinical Microbiology (IF 5.4, 36 citations, USA) - also contribute significantly to the highly cited literature. Geographically, Germany, the USA, the Netherlands, and Poland have achieved high citation counts in high-impact interdisciplinary journals, while China’s highly cited papers are primarily concentrated in traditional forensic journals with lower impact factors (e.g., IF 1.2-2.5) and relatively modest citation counts (≤ 23). These findings indicate that interdisciplinary collaboration and publication in high-impact journals have become key drivers of research impact in forensic medicine, yet a noticeable gap remains between China and leading countries in this regard. Overall, the results underscore that cross-disciplinary integration is increasingly evident in forensic medicine, and that pursuing high-impact interdisciplinary outlets is crucial for achieving global recognition.

WOS-indexed papers are substantially superior in terms of citation counts (highest 961 vs. 128), journal impact factors (including top-tier multidisciplinary journals with IF up to 48.5), and disciplinary scope (covering genetics, neuroscience, sports medicine, nanotechnology, etc.). In contrast, the PubMed-indexed papers are predominantly concentrated in traditional forensic specialty journals (mostly with IF < 5) and exhibit relatively limited citation impact. China has achieved highly cited results in the WOS database, including publications in journals with IFs exceeding 39 (e.g., Chemical Society Reviews), whereas its papers in PubMed remain mainly in traditional forensic journals with lower impact factors (IF 1.2-4.9) and modest citation counts. These findings indicate that the Web of Science database better reflects the high-impact frontiers of interdisciplinary forensic research, while PubMed largely represents the traditional research directions of forensic medicine. Chinese forensic medicine research has achieved breakthroughs in high-impact interdisciplinary journals, yet a gap remains compared with leading Western countries. Future efforts should therefore be directed toward strengthening high-level interdisciplinary collaboration.

Comparison of forensic medicine and public health in PubMed database

A search of the PubMed database using the terms “(forensic medicine) AND (artificial intelligence)” revealed that the annual number of relevant publications grew at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 34.9% from 2016 to 2025 (Figure 6A, red line). Notably, a visual language multimodal artificial intelligence model, named “SongCi,”^[11] was developed for forensic histopathological diagnosis through a collaboration between the College of Forensic Medicine, the College of Mathematics and Statistics, and the College of Life Sciences at Xi’an Jiaotong University. This model employs cutting-edge prototype cross-modal self-supervised contrastive learning to deeply integrate image and text data features, significantly enhancing both the accuracy and efficiency of forensic histopathological diagnosis. The findings were published in Nature Communications.

Figure 6. Publication trends in “forensic medicine & artificial intelligence (AI)” vs. “public health & artificial intelligence (AI)” research (2016-2025). (A) The X-axis represents the publication year, and the Y-axis shows the number of papers. The lines indicate the publication trend from 2016 to 2025; (B) Compound annual growth rates (CAGR) of publication trends across two categories. The bar chart displays the CAGR for each category from 2016 to 2025. Red bars denote the publication trends of forensic Medicine & AI, while blue bars denote public health & AI.

As an applied discipline of considerable importance to public security and health protection, public health has exhibited a notable interdisciplinary trend over the past decade (Figure 6A, blue dotted line). In the context of the interdisciplinary application of AI to public health, a keyword search of the PubMed database revealed 27,378 publications in 2025, which is 69 times the output of forensic medicine. Furthermore, the past decade has witnessed a significant surge in the number of interdisciplinary research papers between public health and other disciplines, including environmental science^[12,13], climatology, computer science^[14], geographic information science, and basic medicine. From 2016 to 2025, publications in forensic medicine grew from 27 to 399 (total growth: 1377.78%; compound annual growth rate [CAGR]: 34.9%), while those in public health increased from 3064 to 27,378 (total growth: 793.60%; CAGR: 27.6%). Notably, forensic medicine exhibited a significantly higher CAGR (34.9% vs. 27.6%, Figure 6B), with a 14.78-fold increase over the decade, compared to 8.94-fold in public health, despite a much lower baseline. This accelerated expansion highlights forensic medicine as a rapidly emerging field, driven by interdisciplinary advances, technological innovation, and growing practical demands.

Unlike public health - which leverages large-scale population data and established regulatory frameworks - forensic medicine operates under high case-specific variability, legal rigor, and strict standardization requirements. While progress has been made in areas such as forensic genetics, virtual autopsy, and advanced toxicology, substantial untapped potential remains for integrating emerging technologies, including AI-driven analytics^[15,16] and real-time biosensing^[17]. The successful integration of AI into public health suggests that forensic medicine may have the potential to accelerate its interdisciplinary transformation, given targeted funding, cross-disciplinary training, and collaborative platforms. Thus, the current gap in publication volume should be seen not as a deficiency, but as a clear direction for future innovation and capacity building.

Comparison of the three databases

The disciplinary composition of highly cited forensic medicine studies was analyzed across three data sources (WOS, PubMed, and Chinese academic database), as visualized in the UpSet plot in Figure 7. First, the horizontal bar chart on the left shows the total number of disciplines within the top-cited papers of each database. More importantly, the vertical bar chart and the corresponding intersection matrix reveal a distinct pattern of database-specific divergence. The vast majority of interdisciplinary directions were unique to a single source: 13 disciplines were found exclusively in PubMed, 10 exclusively in WOS, and 10 exclusively in the Chinese academic databases.

Figure 7. Disciplinary overlap and distribution of highly cited forensic medicine studies across three data sources. WOS: Web of Science.

Despite this high degree of specificity, partial overlaps indicate regional and international alignments. The strongest two-way consensus existed between the international databases, with WOS and PubMed sharing exactly 6 disciplines. The Chinese academic databases exhibited more limited overlap, sharing 4 disciplines with WOS and 1 with PubMed. Notably, 5 disciplines were universally shared across all three databases, forming the only fully connected pathway in the analysis. Taken together, these results suggest that while there is a very narrow set of globally accepted core disciplines, highly cited forensic medicine research is primarily characterized by significant database-specific disparities and distinct regional research emphases.