Safety Lit - How Items Are Selected

How Items Are Selected

SafetyLit includes summaries of "scholarly" reports, conference proceedings, and journal articles about injury occurrence and risk factors. More specifically, items are considered relevant if they concern any of the pre-event or event elements of the Haddon Matrix; the epidemiology of injury and injury risk factors; or the financial, personal, or societal costs or consequences of the any injury or risk factor.

Although items 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 same may be said for academic programs, book publishers, government agencies, etc. 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 Further, the best knowledge today may become outdated tomorrow.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, 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 These out-of-date items may be useful for authors or researchers who are examining the progression of scientific or social thought on a topic.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.