ABSTRACT
<b>Objective: </b>We analyzed articles in the Japanese Journal of Drug Informatics with the goal of identifying recent research trends in drug informatics.<br><b>Method: </b>The appearance frequencies of keywords in the Japanese Journal of Drug Informatics (2001: vol. 3 (1) to 2009: vol. 11 (4)) and Japanese Journal of Pharmaceutical Health Care and Sciences (2009: vol. 35 (1) to (6)), and words in abstracts in Japanese Journal of Drug Informatics (2009: vol. 11 (1) to 2010: vol. 12 (4)) were analyzed. <br><b>Results: </b>To investigate keywords in the Japanese Journal of Drug Informatics, appearance frequencies of information, drug, drugs and pharmacist in 2001: vol. 3 (1) to 2003: vol. 5 (4), those of information, drug, drugs, medical, medication and questionnaire in 2004: vol. 6 (1) to 2006: vol. 8 (4), and those of information, drug, questionnaire, survey, pharmacist, adverse and generic in 2007: vol. 9 (1) to 2009: vol. 11 (4) were higher than those of other keywords. In the Japanese Journal of Pharmaceutical Health Care and Sciences, appearance frequencies of drug, pharmacy, care, patient, pharmaceutical, cancer, education, training, analysis and drugs were higher than those of other keywords. Information, drug(s), patients, pharmacists, hospital, use, questionnaire, medical, adverse, survey, agents, generic and pharmaceutical were high frequency words used in abstracts published in the Japanese Journal of Drug Informatics. These words in abstracts indicate a Zipf’s law-like rank distribution. Co-occurrence network graphs using abstracts showed that the first cluster consisted of medical, drug, adverse, drugs, pharmaceutical, hospital, doctors, contents and drug around information and pharmacists as hubs, and the second cluster consisted of 3 words (agents, woman and pregnant). Furthermore, co-occurrence network graphs indicated that care, medical, pharmaceutical, information, adverse, pharmacists, hospital, doctors, questionnaire, woman, pregnant, package and side were matters of important arguments and/or phenomena.<br><b>Conclusion: </b>These data suggest that the scope of themes in articles published in the Japanese Journal of Drug Informatics is establishing definitive categories. The recent themes and contents of the Japanese Journal of Drug Informatics were closely and mutually related.
ABSTRACT
In 2008, Japanese Society of Drug Informatics (JASDI) organized the Future Vision Committee (the Committee) to propose the essential focus of drug informatics. To explore a future vision about the drug information sciences, it was necessary to collect a variety of opinions widely from researchers. Therefore, at the 11<sup>th</sup> annual meeting of JASDI in July 5-6, 2008, the Committee convened a workshop to extract problems in the researches of drug informatics by using KJ method and evaluated the contents. The major problems raised were “the field of drug informatics is too broad” and “there is no definition and/or no system of the drug informatics”. Related problems raised are the shortness of the history and lack of originality in the study. From different viewpoints, it was also pointed out that the methodology of the research is not well established and no systematic education is provided. Taken together, major problems in drug informatics are concluded to be the lack of definition and the lack of systematizations, and will be solved to a certain extent by defining the outcome of the researches in drug informatics.