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As is well known, defects such as a vacancy, an interstitial ion, substitution species and positional disorder, have much influence on various physical and chemical properties of crystalline oxides. Therefore, it can be regarded as one of the key issues to reveal defect distributions and local environments around defects in crystals. However, general analytical methods for crystal structures such as the Rietveld refinement often give us vague information on defects unfortunately since the defect structures is atomic arrangements without periodicity. In order to clarify defect structures underneath crystal structures, we have focused on pair distribution function (PDF) obtained from neutron and synchrotron X-ray total scatterings. This is because the PDF analysis enables us to discuss a non-periodic atomic arrangement up to nanoscale distance. In this paper, we review briefly how to obtain PDF and analytical methods of PDF. We also introduce our recent results of the PDF analysis especially on ionic-conduction crystals in the latter part. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]