SafetyLit
Encyclopedia
SafetyLit is a bibliographic database
and online update of recently published scholarly research of relevance to those interested in the broad field of injury prevention and safety promotion. Initiated in 1995, SafetyLit is a cooperative project of the San Diego State University College of Health & Human Services
and the World Health Organization
- Department of Injuries and Violence Prevention.
(NLM) PubMed
system, SafetyLit is a free service that is distributed without commercial messages. There are many online literature databases. Most are subscription-based, costly and are available only through a library. Typically, these databases focus on a specific scientific discipline. For example, PubMed has a bio-medicine focus, PsycINFO
focuses upon behavioral issues, Compendex on engineering, etc.
While other bibliographic databases can focus upon the publications of only one or two professional disciplines, it has been known since the early 20th Century that issues relevant to safety research and policy development arise from many professional disciplines. Thus, SafetyLit draws its content from many disciplines. Articles are selected that are relevant to the issues of injury prevention and safety promotion from over 11,200 scholarly journals in the physical, biological and social sciences, as well as engineering, medicine, and the applied social sciences.
(CDC), National Center for Injury Prevention and Control
(NCIPC). This bibliographic update was a print-out of article citations from Medline that were indexed with selected MeSH
terms related to the treatment and prevention of injuries. This free service was provided at a time when searching Medline was quite costly. The NCIPC update service ended in 1995, a few months before the National Library of Medicine began providing an experimental version of PubMed.
To help fill the gap from that loss, SafetyLit began in 1995 as a simple email message sent to about 20 people who were affiliated with the CDC-funded state Disability Prevention Programs in Louisiana and a few other U.S. states. As more and more people learned about SafetyLit, the mailing list expanded. By the end of 1998 the updates were circulated to more than 5000 addresses. By the close of 1999 the address list had expanded beyond 15,000.
During 1999, several publishing companies began supplying their journal article citation and abstract data to SafetyLit and the journal sources expanded far beyond what was available through PubMed. In 2001 the SafetyLit update service moved from a series of lengthy flat-file newsletters to a database-driven dynamic website. The email newsletter became a simple announcement that a pdf version of Update Bulletin is available on the SafetyLit website. With that improvement, an archive database with search capacity was established. From that time forward, each week brought the addition of about 200-300 recently-published articles and more than 800 articles from the back-files of journals that published relevant material.
(pISSN and eISSN), the range of years the journal has been published, the journal's previous or subsequent titles, and a link to the journal's pages on the publisher's website. Each journal listing includes a link to the OCLC WorldCat
find item in a nearby library service.
; the epidemiology of injury and injury risk factors; or the financial, personal, or societal costs or consequences of the any injury or risk factor.
SafetyLit draws from sources that publish material that has been subjected to peer review
. Most articles in SafetyLit are written in the English language or contain titles and abstracts in English. However, the abstracts of some non-English articles are included after translation to English by staff or volunteers. SafetyLit staff and volunteers regularly hand-examine (issue by issue) more than 3400 current scholarly journals from many nations to find relevant material. Other journals are scanned at least once per volume.
Although articles are screened for relevant content, SafetyLit makes no attempt to screen for quality. The nature and rigor of the peer review process at one journal may be quite different from other journals. The SafetyLit site contains the following statement:
There are several very good bio-medicine databases that index articles about the assessment and the medical and surgical treatment of injuries (i.e. Medline, EMBASE, Scopus). Thus, in general, articles concerning medical treatment for injuries or complications of medical care are excluded except when the article also contains information on one of the inclusion criteria. Similarly, articles that focus upon routine road or building repair and maintenance are excluded except when those articles are relevant to safety. SafetyLit also includes reports on other topics that may help a reader to make decisions about research or prevention strategies and priorities.
Articles are assigned multiple categories based upon the answer to the question, "Might someone with an interest in (category) find this article useful or interesting?" For example, an article concerning a physiological basis for deep emotional depression could be assigned to the Suicide and Self-Harm category even if suicide is not mentioned in the article text.
The contents of the weekly update are available 4 ways:
1. A PDF file is posted each Monday before 0100 UTC to the SafetyLit website (http://www.safetylit.org/archive.php). The current and past versions of the Weekly Update Bulletin may be found via the 'Browse archives' link from the SafetyLit homepage. The PDF file contains bookmarks that allow a reader to jump directly to any category without needing to scroll through 50-plus pages of citations to get to their category of interest. Those who wish to do so may subscribe to an email notice that will alert them when the bulletin is available at an earlier hour.
2. The new week's citations and abstracts are available in html format at 0100 UTC each Monday by clicking on the 'View current abstracts' link from the SafetyLit home page. (After this time the previous week's material is only available by viewing the appropriate PDF file on the Browse Archives pages or by searching the database.) From here it is possible to scroll through all the week's citations and abstracts or to check selected tick boxes to limit the scope of articles to certain interest categories.
3. A frequent SafetyLit user may avoid the need to tick or un-tick category select-boxes by registering and signing up for a personalized custom listing of articles. This 'My SafetyLit' option allows a user to record the category or categories they want to view each week. Users may allow their browser to automatically log them in and effortlessly view only the citations and abstracts that match their custom setting.
4. Each of the SafetyLit categories is available via RSS feed. A feed with an unduplicated listing (without categories) of all articles is also available. This allows readers to receive new articles throughout the week as they are entered into SafetyLit or at any interval (from immediately upon posting up to once per month) that they desire.
The textword+synonyms search uses the SafetyLit Thesaurus to allow a query to take advantage of synonym ring
and hierarchical term searching. The synonym ring function allows a searcher to use a single textword such as 'baby walker' to substitute for doing a series of regular textword searches using the 15 other terms by which the device is known. The entry of a single term in the textword+synonym box will produce a listing of all articles with text containing any of the synonyms for that term.
reference management software. Records may also be downloaded in RIS and BibTeX formats for import into other software such as EndNote, Mendeley, etc.
Some of the topics that bring the most complaints are not what might be expected:
Bibliographic database
A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records, an organized digital collection of references to published literature, including journal and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government and legal publications, patents, books, etc...
and online update of recently published scholarly research of relevance to those interested in the broad field of injury prevention and safety promotion. Initiated in 1995, SafetyLit is a cooperative project of the San Diego State University College of Health & Human Services
San Diego State University College of Health & Human Services
The College of Health and Human Services faculty, through advising, teaching, and supervising, offers students academic study, field placement, clinical experiences, and research opportunities. The College offers professional education in the health and human service disciplines...
and the World Health Organization
World Health Organization
The World Health Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations that acts as a coordinating authority on international public health. Established on 7 April 1948, with headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, the agency inherited the mandate and resources of its predecessor, the Health...
- Department of Injuries and Violence Prevention.
Background
Like the US National Library of Medicine'sUnited States National Library of Medicine
The United States National Library of Medicine , operated by the United States federal government, is the world's largest medical library. Located in Bethesda, Maryland, the NLM is a division of the National Institutes of Health...
(NLM) PubMed
PubMed
PubMed is a free database accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health maintains the database as part of the Entrez information retrieval system...
system, SafetyLit is a free service that is distributed without commercial messages. There are many online literature databases. Most are subscription-based, costly and are available only through a library. Typically, these databases focus on a specific scientific discipline. For example, PubMed has a bio-medicine focus, PsycINFO
PsycINFO
PsycINFO is a database of abstracts of literature in the field of psychology. It is produced by the American Psychological Association and distributed on the association's and through third-party vendors. It is the electronic version of the now-ceased Psychological Abstracts...
focuses upon behavioral issues, Compendex on engineering, etc.
While other bibliographic databases can focus upon the publications of only one or two professional disciplines, it has been known since the early 20th Century that issues relevant to safety research and policy development arise from many professional disciplines. Thus, SafetyLit draws its content from many disciplines. Articles are selected that are relevant to the issues of injury prevention and safety promotion from over 11,200 scholarly journals in the physical, biological and social sciences, as well as engineering, medicine, and the applied social sciences.
History
The idea for SafetyLit came from an electronic mailing list service provided in the early- to mid-1990s by the librarians at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and PreventionCenters for Disease Control and Prevention
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are a United States federal agency under the Department of Health and Human Services headquartered in Druid Hills, unincorporated DeKalb County, Georgia, in Greater Atlanta...
(CDC), National Center for Injury Prevention and Control
National Center for Injury Prevention and Control
CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and ControlThe U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control's mission is to provide leadership in preventing and controlling injuries, i.e., reducing the incidence, severity, and adverse outcomes of...
(NCIPC). This bibliographic update was a print-out of article citations from Medline that were indexed with selected MeSH
Mesh
Mesh consists of semi-permeable barrier made of connected strands of metal, fiber, or other flexible/ductile material. Mesh is similar to web or net in that it has many attached or woven strands.-Types of mesh:...
terms related to the treatment and prevention of injuries. This free service was provided at a time when searching Medline was quite costly. The NCIPC update service ended in 1995, a few months before the National Library of Medicine began providing an experimental version of PubMed.
To help fill the gap from that loss, SafetyLit began in 1995 as a simple email message sent to about 20 people who were affiliated with the CDC-funded state Disability Prevention Programs in Louisiana and a few other U.S. states. As more and more people learned about SafetyLit, the mailing list expanded. By the end of 1998 the updates were circulated to more than 5000 addresses. By the close of 1999 the address list had expanded beyond 15,000.
During 1999, several publishing companies began supplying their journal article citation and abstract data to SafetyLit and the journal sources expanded far beyond what was available through PubMed. In 2001 the SafetyLit update service moved from a series of lengthy flat-file newsletters to a database-driven dynamic website. The email newsletter became a simple announcement that a pdf version of Update Bulletin is available on the SafetyLit website. With that improvement, an archive database with search capacity was established. From that time forward, each week brought the addition of about 200-300 recently-published articles and more than 800 articles from the back-files of journals that published relevant material.
Sources
Information about the 11,000-plus serials indexed in SafetyLit is found in the SafetyLit Journals Database that lists journal title and current publisher, title abbreviation, both the print and electronic International Standard Serial NumberInternational Standard Serial Number
An International Standard Serial Number is a unique eight-digit number used to identify a print or electronic periodical publication. Periodicals published in both print and electronic form may have two ISSNs, a print ISSN and an electronic ISSN...
(pISSN and eISSN), the range of years the journal has been published, the journal's previous or subsequent titles, and a link to the journal's pages on the publisher's website. Each journal listing includes a link to the OCLC WorldCat
WorldCat
WorldCat is a union catalog which itemizes the collections of 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories which participate in the Online Computer Library Center global cooperative...
find item in a nearby library service.
How articles are selected
SafetyLit includes summaries of "scholarly" reports, conference proceedings, and journal articles about injury occurrence and risk factors. More specifically, articles are considered relevant if they concern any of the pre-event or event elements of the Haddon MatrixHaddon Matrix
The Haddon Matrix is the most commonly used paradigm in the injury prevention field.Developed by William Haddon in 1970, the matrix looks at factors related to personal attributes, vector or agent attributes, and environmental attributes before, during and after an injury or death...
; the epidemiology of injury and injury risk factors; or the financial, personal, or societal costs or consequences of the any injury or risk factor.
SafetyLit draws from sources that publish material that has been subjected to peer review
Peer review
Peer review is a process of self-regulation by a profession or a process of evaluation involving qualified individuals within the relevant field. Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards, improve performance and provide credibility...
. Most articles in SafetyLit are written in the English language or contain titles and abstracts in English. However, the abstracts of some non-English articles are included after translation to English by staff or volunteers. SafetyLit staff and volunteers regularly hand-examine (issue by issue) more than 3400 current scholarly journals from many nations to find relevant material. Other journals are scanned at least once per volume.
Although articles are screened for relevant content, SafetyLit makes no attempt to screen for quality. The nature and rigor of the peer review process at one journal may be quite different from other journals. The SafetyLit site contains the following statement:
- The purpose of SafetyLit is to provide information to allow users to identify and find articles (both good and poor) that have been published about injury prevention and safety promotion topics... An important part of professionalism is to identify flawed publications and counter the flaws by commenting upon them in a letter to the editor of the journal where the article was published. Further, the best knowledge today may become outdated tomorrow. Although published corrections and errata are included [in SafetyLit when available], the older articles with inaccuracies are not removed from the site. These out-of-date items may be useful for authors or researchers who are examining the progression of scientific or social thought on a topic.
There are several very good bio-medicine databases that index articles about the assessment and the medical and surgical treatment of injuries (i.e. Medline, EMBASE, Scopus). Thus, in general, articles concerning medical treatment for injuries or complications of medical care are excluded except when the article also contains information on one of the inclusion criteria. Similarly, articles that focus upon routine road or building repair and maintenance are excluded except when those articles are relevant to safety. SafetyLit also includes reports on other topics that may help a reader to make decisions about research or prevention strategies and priorities.
SafetyLit Weekly Update Bulletin
The Weekly Update Bulletin is a pdf document containing citations of 200-300 new journal articles. Clicking on the title of the article will provide more detail such as an abstract or a link to the full text if these are available. Articles are listed under 38 interest categories. The purpose of the categories within SafetyLit is to make it easy for subscribers to the Weekly Update Bulletin to limit their content only to the topics that are within the sphere of their interest.Articles are assigned multiple categories based upon the answer to the question, "Might someone with an interest in (category) find this article useful or interesting?" For example, an article concerning a physiological basis for deep emotional depression could be assigned to the Suicide and Self-Harm category even if suicide is not mentioned in the article text.
The contents of the weekly update are available 4 ways:
1. A PDF file is posted each Monday before 0100 UTC to the SafetyLit website (http://www.safetylit.org/archive.php). The current and past versions of the Weekly Update Bulletin may be found via the 'Browse archives' link from the SafetyLit homepage. The PDF file contains bookmarks that allow a reader to jump directly to any category without needing to scroll through 50-plus pages of citations to get to their category of interest. Those who wish to do so may subscribe to an email notice that will alert them when the bulletin is available at an earlier hour.
2. The new week's citations and abstracts are available in html format at 0100 UTC each Monday by clicking on the 'View current abstracts' link from the SafetyLit home page. (After this time the previous week's material is only available by viewing the appropriate PDF file on the Browse Archives pages or by searching the database.) From here it is possible to scroll through all the week's citations and abstracts or to check selected tick boxes to limit the scope of articles to certain interest categories.
3. A frequent SafetyLit user may avoid the need to tick or un-tick category select-boxes by registering and signing up for a personalized custom listing of articles. This 'My SafetyLit' option allows a user to record the category or categories they want to view each week. Users may allow their browser to automatically log them in and effortlessly view only the citations and abstracts that match their custom setting.
4. Each of the SafetyLit categories is available via RSS feed. A feed with an unduplicated listing (without categories) of all articles is also available. This allows readers to receive new articles throughout the week as they are entered into SafetyLit or at any interval (from immediately upon posting up to once per month) that they desire.
SafetyLit database archive
The SafetyLit database contains more than 325,000 articles (as of 28 August 2011) with more than 1000 items being added each week. The database may be searched by author name or textword using the basic search screen or, if the advanced search screen is used, by author name, textword, hybrid textword+synonyms, or journal using Boolean operators.The textword+synonyms search uses the SafetyLit Thesaurus to allow a query to take advantage of synonym ring
Synonym ring
In metadata a synonym ring or synset, is a group of data elements that are considered semantically equivalent for the purposes of information retrieval. These data elements are frequently found in different metadata registries...
and hierarchical term searching. The synonym ring function allows a searcher to use a single textword such as 'baby walker' to substitute for doing a series of regular textword searches using the 15 other terms by which the device is known. The entry of a single term in the textword+synonym box will produce a listing of all articles with text containing any of the synonyms for that term.
SafetyLit Thesaurus
The SafetyLit Thesaurus is the basis for hybrid textword+synonym search capacity. There are often many synonyms and spelling variants for potential search terms. New terms and synonyms are added weekly. Work on the SafetyLit thesaurus is not finished, so the full hierarchical search system is not yet complete. However, some term hierarchies such as geographic area names are available for searching. For example, an index term search using ‘Australia’ will find articles that contain the words ‘Canberra’, ‘Adelaide’, or ‘Perth’, even if the SafetyLit records do not contain the word ‘Australia’.Availability of search results to bibliography management software
All resources found from a query of the SafetyLit database are directly available to the free ZoteroZotero
Zotero is free, open source reference management software to manage bibliographic data and related research materials . Notable features include web browser integration, online syncing, generation of in-text citations, footnotes and bibliographies, as well as integration with the word processors...
reference management software. Records may also be downloaded in RIS and BibTeX formats for import into other software such as EndNote, Mendeley, etc.
Controversy
Researchers and policymakers who address controversial safety-related issues have been targets of threats or violence for hundreds of years from those with strong feelings who wish to obstruct certain knowledge for the basis of evidence-based policy. More recently, researchers and their institutions have come under attack for work in the areas of firearms and motorcycle helmets. These sorts of things are known because they have been the subject of editorials in journals and even print and broadcast news stories. However, providers of scholarly information such as SafetyLit have also been harmed by those who disagree with part of its content. Some SafetyLit readers write letters to the agencies and organizations that provide funding for the project. Others take more extreme action to make their point. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have been made against the SafetyLit servers. Other attackers organized their interest groups to subscribe to the SafetyLit email service and then to label the SafetyLit messages as unsolicited spam by using their internet service providers' automated reporting process. This in an unsuccessful attempt to block all users of that ISP from receiving SafetyLit email messages.Some of the topics that bring the most complaints are not what might be expected:
- The single most controversial subject that generates the most letters are citations to articles that complainers believe promote bicycle helmetBicycle helmetA bicycle helmet is a helmet intended to be worn while riding a bicycle. They are designed to attenuate impacts to the skull of a cyclist in falls while minimizing side effects such as interference with peripheral vision...
wearing. Throughout the year, SafetyLit receives an average of 16.4 complaints each week that the Update Bulletin contains a citation to an article about bicycle helmets. (Articles about helmet laws are not counted here. Instead, they are included below under 'nanny government'.)
- The second-most controversial topic is any article concerning brain or spinal cord injury prevention. These complaints come from those who take an extreme view on issues of the rights of persons with acquired disabilities. They argue that efforts to prevent central nervous system injuries suggest that persons who have experienced these injuries are less valued than persons who are uninjured.
- Articles about 'nanny government' laws or regulations (14.3 complaints per week). These are complaints about issues such as: building codes; motor vehicle design standards and regulations (eg, air bags, helmet laws, speed limits, cellular telephone prohibitions); consumer product risks and regulations.
- Articles they believe are biased in favor of firearm control regulations (14.1)
- Articles they believe are biased in opposition to firearm control regulations (11.6)
- Articles about an ethnic group or population they do not like (8.3)
- Articles about suicide prevention (5.2). The writers believe that suicide can be a good and rational choice—even for adolescents.
- Articles that reference psychology, human behavior, and risk-taking (5.0). The writers believe that these are biased in favor of psychology and psychiatry, professions they believe are a threat to basic human rights and a danger to society.
- Articles about intimate partner violence (4.8). Correspondents say the problem is exaggerated, that most reported cases are lies, or that most times the physical aggression was provoked and deserved.
- Articles about alcohol and the risk of traffic crashes (4.7). The writers argue that people who drink and drive rarely have crashes and, when they do, it is not necessarily related to alcohol or that, for the many drivers who are tense and highly strung, alcohol relaxes them and they drive more safely.