The Health Effects Institute
	PAPA-SAN Public Health and Air Pollution in Asia: Science Access on the Net
Methods The research reports listed in PAPA-SAN were systematically compiled as part of HEI’s Public Health and Air Pollution in Asia (PAPA) program through successive searches of the world’s scientific literature. The goal of the original search, conducted in 2003, was to identify and describe all reports published in the peer-reviewed literature in English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean that presented original estimates of the health effects of air pollution in southern and eastern Asia. Data from this search, along with a detailed description of the search methods, were published by HEI as part of Special Report 15, Health Effects of Outdoor Air Pollution in Developing Countries of Asia: A Literature Review, in April 2004. The data on reports were updated, expanded, and published online in April 2006 as PAPA-SAN. The search methods were further refined to help keep the database current through subsequent searches. Since its initial release, PAPA-SAN has been updated periodically to include more recent reports published around the world, as well as—in some cases—earlier reports that had not previously been identified. A December 2006 update included reports published from 1980 through June 2006. The current update includes reports identified through September 2007 and was released online in May 2008. Search strategy Major online databases of peer-reviewed scientific literature, such as PubMed, EMBASE, and Web of Science (which includes the Science Citation Index), were searched to identify potentially pertinent studies published between 1980 and September 2007. Two additional databases—KoreaMed and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI)—were searched to identify reports in Korean- and Chinese-language journals, respectively. The searches were conducted using combinations of three groups of keywords: Country or region (Asia, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, China, Cambodia, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam); Air pollution or air pollutants or air quality; and Health or mortality or morbidity or adverse effects or prevalence or epidemiology. PAPA-SAN staff also searched bibliographies of relevant reviews and reports, library databases of international organizations—such as the World Health Organization, World Bank, and United Nations—and leading non–English-language journals of preventive medicine and epidemiology to identify additional reports. Review strategy Using ProCite™ software, a database of the identified reports was created, and nonrelevant reports in the following categories were removed: Reports on countries outside of southern and eastern Asia (e.g., Iran, Iraq, Israel, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, or Uzbekistan) Reports restricted to health effects of indoor exposures (e.g., to cooking fuels, environmental tobacco smoke, fungi, molds, or radon) Reports restricted to non-ambient occupational environments Reports of animal experiments Reports restricted to assessing or measuring air pollution Reports were also removed from the database if they did not have an abstract, did not report original research results (e.g., policy papers, commentaries, or reviews), or reported estimates of either effects of air pollution or effects on health but not both. Data management The abstracts and texts of the reports remaining in the database were then reviewed. Key information on each report was compiled into a master table (Table 1. All Studies ) in which reports were listed by first author. This table includes the study design, study location, study period, study population (with sample size, age, and other characteristics, when available), pollutants studied, health outcomes studied, and a summary of findings based on the authors’ own description of their results. In addition, 27 subsidiary tables listing reports according to country or region, study design, pollutants, and health outcomes were compiled. You can find more information here on study designs, pollutants, and abbreviations commonly used in air pollution research. For more information on our methods, please download the PAPA-SAN Literature Review Manual . This manual was created in 2006, with minor revisions added in March 2008. Read about the project’s staff and contributors here.
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