Abstract: Confusion of similar drug names can lead to medication errors. Text enhancement design for similar drug names is one of the common methods to reduce visual confusion of drug names. However, few empirical studies focus on the impact of text visualization mechanisms in visual discrimination of similar Chinese drug names. Our study adopts a three-factor within-subject experimental design to examine the effect of text enhancement (bold, red, contrasted, magnified, unenhanced), name length (long, short), and similarity (high, medium, low) on visual discrimination tasks for similar Chinese drug names. Subjects consisted of 30 medical-related students are asked to quickly and accurately determine whether the names of two drugs successively presented on a screen are identical. The response time, accuracy ratio, and perceived confidence of subjects are defined as the primary dependent variables. Results show that font magnification in the different parts of similar drug names can significantly shorten the response time of subjects; longer drug names and higher similarity result in longer response time. Text enhancement can significantly improve the accuracy in drug name discrimination, while higher similarity result in lower accuracy. In addition, text enhancement significantly improves the confidence of subjects in correctly discriminating similar drug names. The results can support the effectiveness of text enhancement in highlighting differences between similar Chinese drug names.