Introduction: Pharmaceutical pricing has only recently gained space in mainstream health science literature.Objectives:Bibliometric and content description of health science academic literature and ad hoc analysis of greyliterature on factors influencing pharmaceutical pricing on databases commonly accessed by healthcare professionals.Methods:Scoping study with no time limits performed in Medline, Scopus and Scielo, and relevant sites anddatabases for grey literature, using search terms with database-appropriate keywords.Results:Two hundred four articles were published in 103 peer-reviewed journals between 1981 and 2016 (last searchyear). In grey literature 78 documents were retrieved in the final selection. Five key thematic clusters for analysingpharmaceutical pricing emerged: market dynamics, segmented into (i) supply-related, (ii) consumer-related and (iii)product-related; (iv) trading strategies, either buyer’s or seller’s and (v) regulatory approach. In peer-reviewed literaturethere is an overall dominance of themes referring to trading strategies and regulatory approaches and a wide thematiccluster scope. Over half of this literature was produced after the year 2010. International agency technical papers makeup the most significant contributions of grey literature, with a clear focus on regulatory approaches to pricing andwider consideration of emerging countries. Research lags in the literature on factors affecting pharmaceutical pricinginclude impacts of financing schemes, market liberalization, internet trading and biosimilars on prices, with insufficientdiscussion identified for the effects of discounts/rebates, profits and price transparency.Conclusions:Interest in pharmaceutical pricing literature is increasing. Robust evidence-producing study designs forpricing interventions will be a welcome development.