Pharmaceutical information: A 30-year perspective on the literature

The literature describing the pharmaceutical information is reviewed, from 1980 (with some earlier material included) to 2008. The review, with 466 references covers: the pharmaceutical information domain; previous reviews and monographs; pharmaceutical information producers and users; pharmaceutical information organisation (classifications, thesaurus and terminoloigies); pharmaceutical information sources, services and retrieval; pharmaceutical information and knowledge management; and the domain's influence on the information science discipline. The review shows the pharmaceutical subject domain to be particularly information intensive, with a complex communication chain, involving a notably varied set of producers and users of information, and a rich and diverse set of resources. The area has seen much pioneering work in the development of information systems and services, and of the management of information and knowledge. It can reasonably be argued that it stimulated and nurtured the development of information science as a discipline.