Limitations
The total number of pharmacology educators around the world has not been rigorously determined, but is likely to be many thousands. Our study involved educators from every continent, but we would need a far larger, more representative sample size to claim international consensus on our list of core concepts. Additionally, volunteer bias could have contributed to the outcomes of this study. These concerns are offset by the high degree of similarity between the list of core concepts identified by rigorous, multi-stage methodology in this study with that of the pilot work in Australia and New Zealand. Additionally, the participants in this study were educators; different views on the core concepts may be held by health practitioners or pharmacologists in industry or research. Finally, the poor response rate to the survey from some countries and the overrepresentation of others has the potential to bias the results towards the views of educators in those over-represented countries. Nevertheless, the use of the text mining approach and the high degree of similarity between the pilot study and the present work both provide confidence that the list of core concepts we have developed are broadly representative of the views of experts in the discipline.