Importance of Literature in Pharmacovigilance: A Review

Pharmacovigilance is to track and detect new adverse drug reactions mainly due to drugs or due to any other chemical substance or similar entity. The knowledge of a drug’s adverse reactions can be increased by various means, including spontaneous reporting, intensive monitoring and literature searching. But, in this review, we discuss how the medical literature plays a crucial role in pharmacovigilance. It is necessary to improve systematic reviews of adverse drug reactions. As literature is one of the vital sources of signal detection, it is essential for pharmaceutical companies to establish pharmacovigilance programs that capitalize on the best available information from multiple data sources. So, it is important to develop a prototype that first reproduces and standardizes search strategies to have a better information retrieval. Marketing-authorization holders (MAH’s) are encouraged to be aware of publications in their local and international journals frequently or according to local regulation and to bring attention to the company safety departments also. Received: 03-112015