Mapping pharmacy journals: A lexicographic analysis.

Pharmacy journals constitute a heterogeneous group that can be map to identify Pharmacy scientific subareas.This study aimed to objectively map Pharmacy journals by means of a lexicographic analysis of the titles of published articles.Active journals between 2006 and 2016 containing any of the terms 'pharmacy', 'pharmacist*', 'pharmaceut*', 'pharmacol*', or 'pharmacotherap*' in their titles were searched in four databases (01/15/2018): Medline, PubMed Central, Science Citation Index expanded/Social Sciences Citation Index expanded (SCIe/SSCIe), and Scopus CiteScore Metrics. The titles of all the articles (Jan-2006 to Dec-2016) in the identified journals were gathered into a single text corpus. The following analyses were performed (Iramuteq 0.7): lexicographic analysis to determine the number, frequency and distribution of active words; descending hierarchical classification (DHC) to categorize active words and journals into lexical classes; factorial correspondence analyses (FCA) to obtain bi- and tri-dimensional graphs.A total of 285 journals comprising 316,089 articles (median 70.4 articles [IQR 34.0-141.0] per journal per year) were included for the analyses. The journals were indexed in Scopus (90.2%) with a median CiteScore of 1.16 (IQR 0.28-2.55); in SCIe/SSCIe (44.6%) with a median impact factor of 2.410 (IQR 1.629-3.316); and in PubMed (65.7%). The DHC of active words produced three major groups (A, B, C) with two lexical classes each, representing six Pharmacy subareas depicted by the FCA as: Group A comprising 'Cell Pharmacology' (20 journals) and 'Molecular Pharmacology' (46 journals), Group B with 'Clinical Pharmacology' (57 journals) and 'Pharmacy Practice' (67 journals), and Group C with 'Pharmaceutics' (35 journals) and 'Pharmaceutical Analysis' (60 journals). Coverage of the classes in bibliographic databases and impact metrics is unbalanced.Pharmacy journals that can be objectively classified into six different classes that represent different research subareas with uneven coverage in bibliographic databases.