science

SafetyLit

SafetyLit is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand SafetyLit rather than just read about it. In short: SafetyLit (short for "Safety Literature") 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 project of the SafetyLit Foundation in cooperation with the San Diego State University College of Health & Human Services and the World Health Organization - Dep…

Key takeaways

SafetyLit belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect SafetyLit to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of SafetyLit from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

SafetyLit (short for "Safety Literature") 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 project of the SafetyLit Foundation in cooperation with the San Diego State University College of Health & Human Services and the World Health Organization - Department of Violence and Injury Prevention.

Background Like the US National Library of Medicine's (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 distinct 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 16000 scholarly journals (as of November 2020) in the physical, biological and social sciences, as well as engineering, medicine, and the applied social sciences. SafetyLit also indexes selected doctoral theses and relevant technical reports from government agencies and NGOs.

History The idea for SafetyLit came from an electronic mailing list service provided in the early-1990s by Sandra Bonzo and other librarians at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (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 late 1994, about one year before the National Library of Medicine began providing an experimental version of PubMed. To help fill the gap from that loss, SafetyLit began in early 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. The SafetyLit message omitted the treatment references to concentrate upon prevention. As more and more people learned about SafetyLit, the mailing list expanded. In June 1997 PubMed began to index the contents of journals beyond the restrictive Medline core. At that time SafetyLit began using PubMed as its source because 1) it was a free service; 2) its increased scope beyond Medline journals; and 3) improvements to the PubMed query system. By the end of 1998, with an administrative move from Louisiana to the San Diego State University, Graduate School of Public Health), the updates were circulated to more than 5000 subscribed 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 metadata and author's abstracts to SafetyLit and the journal sources expanded far beyond the bio-medicine material that 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 400-500 recently published articles and more than 150 articles from the back-files of journals that published relevant material. In mid-2013, to sustain the contents of the languishing VioLit database, SafetyLit formed a partnership with the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence (CSPV), a research program of the Institute of Behavioral Science (IBS) at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The VioLit database, had items related to preventing youth violence with most records including a thorough review written by CSPV experts. The VioLit expanded article reviews were added to existing SafetyLit records where there is overlap of the database contents and VioLit items that had been missing from SafetyLit were also added. From 1998, through 2013 SafeyLit was supported by grants and contracts with several federal and California state agencies. The U.S. federal Budget sequestration in mid-2013 led to a loss of all federal funding and most of the California support that was available via U.S. Preventive Block Grant and Maternal and Child Health Block Grant support. With the loss of this revenue stream the SafetyLit Foundation was incorporated as a tax exempt organization to facilitate independent funding.

Coverage

Sources Although SafetyLit began with a focus upon articles from scholarly journals, in early 2013 it expanded to include books (and book chapters) and the gray literature (academic doctoral theses, reports from scientific research groups, working papers, etc.).

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with SafetyLit

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what SafetyLit claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to SafetyLit before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about SafetyLit ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of SafetyLit

In research: SafetyLit appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses SafetyLit in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: SafetyLit is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics American health websites, Bibliographic database providers, Bibliographic databases and indexes, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for SafetyLit outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

Affiliate

Preply — study more efficiently by working with a personal tutor. 50% off.

How to study SafetyLit in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what SafetyLit means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain SafetyLit out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is SafetyLit in simple terms?

Why does SafetyLit matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study SafetyLit?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on SafetyLit.