This article traces the trends in the investigational drug databases (the DB), important information sources for R&D of medical drugs since 2000 when the first survey was conducted, and clarifies the recent trend of the DB, issues and demands from the users. As the first half part of the whole article, this deals with 1) questionnaires regarding usage condition forwarded to pharmaceutical or related firms, 2) the DB comparison covering IDdb, Integrity (INT), Pharmaprojets (PPJ), R&D Insight (RDI), R&D Focus (RDF) and Asuno Shinyaku, and 3) Comparison of usability for IDdb and INT (both are DBs on Web version). It is found that while large size DB on Web version is increasingly used, traditional DB is still used very often along with CD-ROM and commercial online searched DB. It is also found that each vendor continues to make every effort to improve DB usability by introducing and implementing new functions. It is, however, found that there are seen no improvements in each DB, for instance, lack of update information related to the development stage, which seems to drive users to use several DBs at the same search session. Comparison of usability between IDdb and INT showed that the both facilitate many functions so that one is not differentiated with other, but IDdb is still anticipated that it should add download function of structural data while INT needs to improve in its individual functions, so on.
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