Kazuhiko HORIGUCHI
School of Health Sciences & Nursing, the University of Tokyo,
　 Tokyo,Japan

[ABSTRACT]

　Medicinal plant is one of the most valuable natural resouces. It is said that more than 10,000 plant species are used for medicinal purposes mainly as traditional medicines and at least 25 percent of drugs used in modern pharmacopia are derived from plants.
　As strong interest in natural-healing and alternative medicine grows, more and more people are turning to traditional herbal treatment.
　In order to develop new drugs for helpless diseses and to obtain scientific research result for safety and efficacy, to organize usable and reliable medicinal plants information is great concern by researchers and clinicians.
　One of the issues to provide reliable medicinal plant information is that it is not always possible to identify some species. This may be due to the fact that same plant might be known by different local names, or widely differing species are known by the same name in different cultures. In this paper the author does not attempt to reach a solution, rather the aim is to present the issues associated with medicinal plant information on some international databases.

Table 1. TYPE OF MEDICINAL PLANT DATABAE

	Secondary information databases	Tertiary information databases
information souces	only published	published and unpublished
record type	bibliographic detail and abstract	encyclopaedic type and compendium
contains	text	illustrations, diagrams, photographs, structural formulae etc.
subject indexing	in-depth	restricted or not
update	regular and frequent	infrequent