  Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) form an important area of research.
In spite of its importance, it is difficult for researchers to evaluate the
domain primarily because of a considerable spread of relevant literature in
interdisciplinary domains. Previous surveys of CDSS have examined the domain
from the perspective of individual disciplines. However, to the best of our
knowledge, no visual scientometric survey of CDSS has previously been conducted
which provides a broader spectrum of the domain with a horizon covering
multiple disciplines. While traditional systematic literature surveys focus on
analyzing literature using arbitrary results, visual surveys allow for the
analysis of domains by using complex network-based analytical models. In this
paper, we present a detailed visual survey of CDSS literature using important
papers selected from highly cited sources in the Thomson Reuters web of
science. We analyze the entire set of relevant literature indexed in the Web of
Science database. Our key results include the discovery of the articles which
have served as key turning points in literature. Additionally, we have
identified highly cited authors and the key country of origin of top
publications. We also present the Universities with the strongest citation
bursts. Finally, our network analysis has also identified the key journals and
subject categories both in terms of centrality and frequency. It is our belief
that this paper will thus serve as an important role for researchers as well as
clinical practitioners interested in identifying key literature and resources
in the domain of clinical decision support.
