Each country has its own set of pharmaceutical codes for medicines, such as CIS in France, CNK in Belgium, PZN in Germany, etc. It is generally complemented with presentation codes, that identify the packaged product. Ultimately, the EU pharmaceutical codes will be superseded by the Products facet of the SPOR database, encoded in IDMP, and curated by the EMA.

The evaluation of metrics is done against CIS, the French pharmaceutical code system for products. The codes from other countries or the future SPOR product code would give similar results.

The CIS codification was initiated in 1972. Only products authorised in France are encoded. For the time being, the CIS database contains 243 codes for vaccine products. It results in an exhaustiveness index of 20%.

Pharmaceutical codes identify products without any ambiguity, the unambiguousness index is at 100%.

Pharmaceutical codes are only lists of codes and labels; they do not carry any codified information about the product nature. Hence their informativeness index is 0%.