Cheminformatics or Chemoinformatics ?

Cheminformatics or Cheminformatics ?

Cheminformatics or Chemoinformatics ?

Or maybe chemiinformatics, molecular informatics, chemical informatics, or even chemobioinformatics. What is the real name of our favourite field ? All these options have some advantages. By using short cheminformatics you are saving the keyboard of your computer, chemoinformatics sounds nice in sentences like "... our software solution seamlessly integrates chemoinformatics and bioinformatics ...", and the title "Head of chemobioinformatics" on a business card cannot miss the point. Molecular informatics or chemical informatics are less known, but this also means that you are one of the pioneers on the forefront of a new scientific field.

Well, let,s find the answer on the web. In the following table frequencies of words cheminformatics and chemoinformatics in web pages are listed, as determined by a popular search engine Google. The ratio characterises popularity of term cheminformatics over chemoinformatics.

Month	Cheminformatics	Chemoinformatics	Ratio	Chem(o)informatics
Jul 2000	39	684	0.00	723
May 2001	3,000	1,270	2.36	4,270
Oct 2001	5,010	1,640	3.05	6,650
Jun 2002	6,930	2,740	2.54	9,670
Jul 2002	7,700	2,870	2.68	10,570
Aug 2002	6,210	2,990	2.08	9,200
Sep 2002	6,670	4,110	1.62	10,780
Oct 2002	6,750	3,260	2.07	10,010
Jan 2003	11,400	4,210	2.71	15,610
Apr 2003	8,260	5,310	1.56	13,570
Jun 2003	11,200	6,790	1.65	17,990
Aug 2003	10,900	11,900	0.92	22,800
Nov 2003	17,000	8,670	1.96	25,670
Feb 2004	16,200	9,370	1.73	25,570
May 2004	18,900	12,100	1.56	41,000
Jul 2004	24,400	10,400	2.35	34,800
Sep 2004	26,200	10,400	2.52	36,600
Nov 2004	47,900	28,200	1.70	76,100
Jan 2005	59,800	32,400	1.85	92,200
Mar 2005	98,700	26,900	3.67	125,600
Jul 2005	75,400	32,000	2.35	107,400
Oct 2005	174,400	85,300	2.04	259,700
Dec 2005	251,000	97,100	2.58	348,100
Apr 2006	317,000	163,000	1.94	480,000
Sep 2006	315,000	239,000	1.32	554,000
Dec 2006	343,000	176,000	1.95	519,000
Mar 2007	361,000	252,000	1.43	613,000
Aug 2007	372,000	234,000	1.59	606,000

Data copyrighted (C) by Molinspiration Cheminformatics. You are allowed to use these data provided the proper acknowledgement to Molinspiration is provided.

Additional Reading

Some early emails concerning the terms cheminformatics and chemoinformatics (from awful neologism to an established discipline).

Chemical Information Home Page maintained by Gary Wiggins at Indiana University.

If you have a comment concerning this topic, please let us know at , and we will be glad to add it to this page.

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