Abstract
In 1994, Society of Indoor Environment, Japan (SIEJ) was established as an indoor environment workshop in order to offer opportunities to exchange knowledge and opinions among researchers. This study aimed to present fundamental data for further considerations of the indoor environmental studies by showing current and past concerns of researches. In this paper, a research trend on the indoor environment was investigated using Proceedings of the annual meeting of SIEJ based on a bibliometric analysis. The trend analysis was conducted about number of annual presentations, fields of indoor environment, target substances and affiliations of presenters. As a result, the number of presentations increased especially in 2003, which was approximately three times as many as that in 1998, and marked about 100 in the last 4 years. Until 2004 most of presentations were focused on Sick Building Syndrome/ Sick House Syndrome with discussions on formaldehyde and/or volatile organic compounds (VOCs). However, the interests of recent researches became diverse in both fields and target substances. About a half of presentations were conducted by corroborative works among academia, industry and/or public sectors. This suggests researchers attending the annual meetings of SIEJ tend to develop a practical science in the field of indoor environment.
