Identification Of Pharmaceutical Frontier Fields

Objective:The study aims to identify the global and China’s frontier fields of pharmacy, and to make suggestions for the development of China’s frontier fields of pharmacy accordingly.Contents:1. Identifying the global frontier fields of pharmacy.2. Identifying China’s frontier fields of pharmacy.3. Comparing China’s frontier fields of pharmacy with the global ones.4. Making suggestions for the development of China’s frontier fields of pharmacy accordingly.Methods:The articles from 2012 to 2014 in the field of pharmacy were retrieved from the Web of Science database. The bibliographic information and the reference were imported into the Thomson Data Analyzer software to analyze. The highly cited papers were analyzed by co-citation analysis method quantitatively, the result of which will then be summarized and refined qualitative by experts so as to identify and compare the global and China’s frontier fields of pharmacy.Results:1. Two hundred and twenty three highly cited papers in global pharmaceutical field database were analyzed by adopting co-citation analysis. Seventeen clusters of highly cited papers were obtained. The research topics of these 17 paper clusters were interpreted to get 17 research frontier fields of pharmacy, such as "pharmacological research on the targets of endocannabinoid system drugs" (with the mean publishing year and citation frequency to be December 2013 and 398 times, respectively) and "the treatment of hepatitis C patients with different genotype" (with the mean publishing year and citation frequency to be May 2013 and 184 times, respectively). One hundred highly cited papers in China’s pharmaceutical field database were analyzed by adopting by the same method. Eight research frontier fields of the pharmacy were obtained, such as "the pharmacological research of drug targets" (with the mean publishing year and citation frequency to be April 2013 and 53 times, respectively) and "the mechanism of the uridine diphosphoglucuronyl transferase inhibitors" (with the mean publishing year and citation frequency to be March 2013 and 172 times, respectively).2. By interviewing experts, six global research frontier fields of pharmacy and five China’s research frontier fields of pharmacy were obtained, such as "research on anticancer agents" and "pharmacological research of key drugs".3. According to the results of comparing China’s frontier fields of pharmacy with the global ones, "research on anticancer agents", "pharmacological research of key drugs", "research on natural products" and "research on biotechnology medicines" were identified as both the global frontier fields and China’s frontier ones; "research on anti-infective agents" and "research on antidiabetic agents" were identified as the global frontier fields but not China’s frontier ones; "research on traditional Chinese medicine" were identified as China’s frontier field but not the global ones.Conclusions:1. "Research on anticancer agents", "pharmacological research of key drugs", "research on natural products", "research on biotechnology medicines", "research on anti-infective agents" and "research on antidiabetic agents" are the global frontier fields of pharmacy.2. "Research on anticancer agent", "pharmacological research of key drugs", "research on natural products", "research on biotechnology medicines" and "research on traditional Chinese medicine" are China’s frontier fields of pharmacy.3. Comparing with the global frontier fields of pharmacy, researches on anti-infective agents and antidiabetic agents are relatively weak fields of China, while research on traditional Chinese medicine is a relatively advanced field of China.Suggestions:1. Improving the quality of research and promoting the development of advantaged frontier fields of pharmacy continuously.2. Optimizing the allocation of resources and paying more attention to the relatively weak fields.3. Giving full play to the relatively advanced field so as to strengthen the characteristic research of China.