bio-, chemo-, neuro-, eco-informatics… why no psycho-?

The latest issue of the APS Observer features a special section on methods. I contributed a piece discussing the need for a full-fledged discipline of psychoinformatics:

Scientific progress depends on our ability to harness and apply modern information technology. Many advances in the biological and social sciences now emerge directly from advances in the large-scale acquisition, management, and synthesis of scientific data. The application of information technology to science isn’t just a happy accident; it’s also a field in its own right — one commonly referred to as informatics. Prefix that term with a Greek root or two and you get other terms like bioinformatics, neuroinformatics, and ecoinformatics — all well-established fields responsible for many of the most exciting recent discoveries in their parent disciplines.

Curiously, following the same convention also gives us a field called psychoinformatics — which, if you believe Google, doesn’t exist at all (a search for the term returns only 500 hits as of this writing; Figure 1). The discrepancy is surprising, because labels aside, it’s clear that psychological scientists are already harnessing information technology in powerful and creative ways — often reshaping the very way we collect, organize, and synthesize our data.

Here’s the picture that’s worth, oh, at least ten or fifteen words:

Figure 1. Number of Google search hits for informatics-related terms, by prefix.

You can read the rest of the piece here if you’re so inclined. Check out some of the other articles too; I particularly like Denny Borsboom’s piece on network analysis. EDIT: and Anna Mikulak’s piece on optogenetics! I forgot the piece on optogenetics! How can you not love optogenetics!