A bibliometric analysis of the literature of chemoinformatics

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to analyse the literature of chemoinformatics, a subject that has arisen over the last few years and that draws on techniques from a range of disciplines, most notably chemistry (particularly computational and medicinal chemistry), computer science and information science. Design/methodology/approach – Discusses subject, author and citation searches of (principally) the web of knowledge database. Findings – The Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling (previously the Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Sciences ) is the core journal for the subject, but with many significant papers being published in journals whose principal focus is molecular modelling, quantitative structure‐activity relationships or more general aspects of chemistry. The discipline is international in scope, and many of the most cited papers describe software packages that play a key role in modern chemoinformatics research. Originality/value – This is the first bibliometric study of chemoinformatics, and one of only a very few that consider the bibliometrics of computational chemistry more generally.