Descriptive Analysis of the Drug Name Lexicon
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0092-8615/2001 Copyright 0 2001 Drug Information Association Inc.
DESCRIPTIVE ANALYSIS OF THE DRUG NAME LEXICON BRUCEL. LAMBERT, PHD Department of Pharmacy Administration and Department of Pharmacy Practice
KEN-YUCHANG,BPHARM,MPH,
AND
SWU-JANE LIN,BPHARM,MPH
Department of Pharmacy Administration University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
The complexity of the drug use process is managed in part by developing systematic nomenclature for drugs. This nomenclature is cataloged in a variety of drug information databases. Answers to simple questions about the whole population of brand and generic drug names, however, are not easily obtained. This paper provides a descriptive analysis of the drug name lexicon, with a primary (though not exclusive) emphasis on drugs marketed in the United States. Using the techniques of computational lexicography, one large database of trademark names (the US Patent and Trademark database) and one large database of nonproprietary names (the U S P Dictionary o f USAN and International Drug Names) were analyzed. Results describe a variety of distributional characteristics of drug names, including the number of characters per name, the number of syllables per name, and the number of words per name. Distributions of pairwise similarity and distance scores for a large sample of names are provided, as are lists of the 25 most common initial and terminal bigrams and trigrams. The information should be of interest to trademark attorneys, patient safety advocates, regulators, and students of drug nomenclature. Key Words: Drug nomenclature; Medication errors; Similarity; Description; Trademark; Generic
INTRODUCTION THE PROCESS OF DISCOVERING, designing, developing, approving, marketing, dispensing, and administering drugs is complex and prone to error (1,2). One strategy for managing complexity and minimizing error has been to develop standard nomenclature for drugs. Drug nomenclature falls into two broad categories: proprietary (ie, brand, trademark) and nonproprietary (ie, generic)
Reprint address: Bruce L. Lambert, PhD, Department of Pharmacy Administration. 833 S. Wood Street (M/C 871). Chicago, IL 60612-7231. E-mail: lambertb@ uic.edu.
(3). These names are listed in a variety of familiar references, including (among many others) the United States Pharmacopeia’s Drug Information for the Health Care Professional, Vol. I, the US.Pharmacopeia Dictionary of USAN and International Drug Names, and international category 5 of the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) Trademarks Registered database (4,5,6).
As useful as these and other references are, however, a great deal of important descriptive information about the drug lexicon is still not readily available. In fact, when we began our research on drug name confusion errors several years ago, there were several
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Bruce L. Larnbert, Ken-Yu Chang,and Swu-Jane Lin
questions about the drug name lexicon that were surprisingly difficult t
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