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Abstract
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Introduction In March 2020 the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Countries around the world responded with disease control measures, such as stay-at-home orders, and school closures and encouraged individuals to wear masks, social distance, clean and disinfect surfaces, etc. While the disease itself naturally remains a top public health concern, unemployment, isolation, stress, changes to the availability of medical/mental health/injury prevention services, and other related unintended effects may have the potential to impact the magnitude and patterns of injuries in communities.
Researchers from around the world are beginning to examine and comment on injury patterns (and issues) seen during the global pandemic. We believe there is a need to conduct a review of the injury scientific literature and to identify, catalog, and organize (by selected injury topics) these published articles for the benefit of the injury epidemiology and prevention community.
Methods We used SafetyLit to identify articles related to COVID-19 and injury because it provides a comprehensive database of scholarly journal articles and technical reports on all issues of unintentional injuries, interpersonal violence, self-harm and the risk-factors for these as well as the individual and societal costs and consequences when injuries occur. SafetyLit provides an index with abstracts to reports from authors working in more than 30 distinct professional disciplines relevant to safety. SafetyLit staff and volunteers perform sensitive daily searches of several key databases under license (PubMed, Global Index Medicus, etc.) and weekly searches of more than 4000 additional journals published in 158 of the world's nations that are not included in these biomedical databases. At least 500 recently-published items are added each week. Additional journals' contents are searched quarterly. The curated nature of the bibliographical database contents and the specialty thesaurus facilitate queries that provide focused results.
SafetyLit records contain bibliographic information, an abstract (if available), and a link to the publishers' website or digital object identifier (DOI). SafetyLit has a searchable function, by boolean logic, by author, title, journal, year, text word, and text word and synonym. Literature found from a query of the SafetyLit database can be exported to reference management software.
The SafetyLit database was searched during the week of December 6th, 2020, for COVID-19 and injury-related articles. We selected 17 injury categories to focus on. These injury topics were: bicycling injuries, burns, child abuse, drownings, drug overdose, falls, home and consumer product safety, homicide, intimate partner violence, pedestrian injuries, pediatric sleep-related deaths, road traffic, sports injuries, suicide, trauma, unintentional firearm injuries, and unintentional poisonings.
For each injury category, a search was conducted using a specific set of key terms connected by boolean logic. The article's title and abstract were searched for these key terms. To determine the most appropriate key term combinations, test searches using different key term combinations were first conducted and evaluated on the number and type of articles produced. All searches were conducted using a text word exact search for the terms: "COVID" OR "pandemic" OR "coronavirus" OR "corona" OR "SARS CoV-2", followed by "AND" and then a text word + synonym search for the set of key terms (interrelated by "OR" logic) relevant to the specific injury category. For example, the set of key terms used for the suicide category was "COVID" OR "pandemic" OR "coronavirus" OR "corona" OR "SARS CoV-2", AND "suicide" OR "self- injurious behavior". The complete list of key term combinations used for each injury category can be found in Appendix A. The search results were restricted to articles published in 2020 and all article types were included.
Bibliographic information on every article identified by the searches was saved using the free and open-source Zotero reference management software's browser extension. A line list of articles by injury category was then exported from Zotero to Microsoft Excel 2011 (Microsoft Corporation, Redmond WA) file. After sorting articles by DOI, duplicate articles that appeared in more than one injury category were removed, and each article was given, for this project, a unique project citation number.
Every article was then reviewed to determine its country of focus and date of publication. Country of focus was defined as the country discussed as the primary subject matter of the article. Articles that discussed more than one country or discussed the global phenomena were labeled "multiple," while articles that had no identifiable country of focus were labeled with "?". Date of publication was defined as the date the article first became available online. For some articles, the specific date of publication could not be determined, but the month of publication was available; for some articles, neither the specific date nor month of publication could be determined, and these fields were labeled "?".
We descriptively analyze the articles by injury category, specific date of publication, month of publication, country of focus, and publication title. A compendium of selected bibliographic information of identified articles was created (Appendix B).
Results An initial search of COVID-19-related articles in the SafetyLit database yielded nearly 1,000 articles (881).
From there, we found nearly 500 (473) unique articles across our 17 injury categories. These 473 unique articles were then analyzed by injury category, date of publication, month of publication, country of focus, and publication title ... |