ABSTRACT
Drug dispensing is a statutory and designated duty of a pharmacist. We aimed to examine the changes in the nature of drug dispensing using a text mining method. Our corpus consisted of text documents from “Chozai Shishin”, the most standard manual for dispensing drugs in Japan, Editions 1 to 13 (Japan Pharmaceutical Association), and we used the KH Coder software for text mining. We constructed networks showing the association between frequent word co-occurrence and edition number, and co-occurrence relations for frequent words in each edition. We found that “patient” superseded “dispensing” as a frequent term over time. “Dispensing” was another frequent term with a highly centralized node in each edition. Accordingly, we targeted the term “dispensing” for network analysis to depict its co-occurrence relations. We found that the range of related words for “dispensing” broadened from “preparation” and “compounding” to include “patient adherence instructions”, “assessment”, “medical treatment”, and “information provision”. Accordingly, we concluded that the content of “dispensing”, which is a pharmacist’s duty, has expanded from the duties of “dispensing drugs” to include “responding to patients” within the definition of “dispensing”, and we were able to present this finding as objective data by using the mechanical method known as text mining.
ABSTRACT
Drug dispensing is a statutory and designated duty of a pharmacist. We aimed to examine the changes in the nature of drug dispensing using a text mining method. Our corpus consisted of text documents from “Chozai Shishin”, the most standard manual for dispensing drugs in Japan, Editions 1 to 13 (Japan Pharmaceutical Association), and we used the KH Coder software for text mining. We constructed networks showing the association between frequent word co-occurrence and edition number, and co-occurrence relations for frequent words in each edition. We found that “patient” superseded “dispensing” as a frequent term over time. “Dispensing” was another frequent term with a highly centralized node in each edition. Accordingly, we targeted the term “dispensing” for network analysis to depict its co-occurrence relations. We found that the range of related words for “dispensing” broadened from “preparation” and “compounding” to include “patient adherence instructions”, “assessment”, “medical treatment”, and “information provision”. Accordingly, we concluded that the content of “dispensing”, which is a pharmacist’s duty, has expanded from the duties of “dispensing drugs” to include “responding to patients” within the definition of “dispensing”, and we were able to present this finding as objective data by using the mechanical method known as text mining.
ABSTRACT
<b>Objective: </b>To quantitatively investigate the history of medical pharmacy research by pharmacists in Japan, original article titles from the <i>Japanese Journal of Pharmaceutical Health Care and Sciences (Jpn J Pharm Health Care Sci) </i>and the <i>Journal of Japanese Society of Hospital Pharmacists (JJSHP) </i>were analyzed by text-mining.<br><b>Method: </b>The titles of all original articles (2,611 and 2,260 articles) published in <i>Jpn J Pharm Health Care Sci </i>and <i>JJSHP </i>between 1975 and 2009 were collected from article databases and analyzed using KH Coder, the free software for quantitative text analysis of the Japanese language. KH Coder extracts basic text information data by counting the occurrence rate of certain words. Article titles were assigned to nine research categories according to coding rules, and the categorization results were analyzed quantitatively.<br><b>Results: </b>Between 1975 and 1989, “pharmaceutical investigation” was the major area of research in the <i>Jpn J Pharm Health Care Sci</i>. Articles assigned to the category “drug therapy” gradually increased through the 1990s and, since 2000, “drug therapy” has dominated medical pharmacy research. In the <i>JJSHP </i>between 1975 and 2004, no characteristic research area was found, and mainly research articles directly related to pharmacist practice were published. However, from 2005 to 2009, articles assigned to the “drug therapy” category accounted for 34% of all published articles making “drug therapy” the major research area in the <i>JJSHP</i>. Thus, in recent years, there is no obvious difference in research areas between the two journals.<br><b>Conclusion: </b>Our analyses suggest that drug therapy research is now at the center of medical pharmacy research by pharmacists in Japan.