Disaster medicine reporting: the need for new guidelines and the CONFIDE statement

Abstract

[Extract] Government agencies, professional societies, trade associations and special interest groups produce vast literature on various aspects of disasters. Much of this literature worldwide is 'grey'– print published or web published – but unobtainable through electronic indexing services. The electronic information alone is now so extensive that the US National Library of Medicine has created a Disaster Information Management Research Center to help with national emergency preparedness and response efforts. Within the published biomedical literature, a recent 30 years review canvassing a range of electronically indexed databases found the majority of event-specific literature indexed in MEDLINE was published across a broad spectrum of disciplines. The top 10 journals cited are listed in Table 1. Over the last decade, disaster literature accelerated markedly prompted by the events of September 11, 2001, at the World Trade Center, which yielded the greatest number of event-specific, peer-reviewed publications to date (686)New journals devoted to disasters continue to emerge with recent ones receiving MEDLINE indexation before their first full year of publication.