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Studies need to make explicit the theoretical and case definitions of injury

Injury Prevention Research Unit, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

Dr C Cryer, Associate Professor, Injury Prevention Research Unit, Department of Preventive and Social Medicine, Dunedin School of Medicine, University of Otago, PO Box 913, Dunedin, New Zealand; colin.cryer@ipru.otago.ac.nz

Accepted 10 January 2008

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Pick up almost any issue of Injury Prevention and you will find statements such as the following:

This statement is meaningless unless the authors say what they are talking about: what injuries they are seeking to describe. An essential element of the description of the study methods, for papers that deal with quantitative results, is a clear statement of the definition of injury that is the intended focus of the paper.

In the above example, if the authors were interested in describing all injuries, including trivial or superficial injuries, then they had no business using attendance at the emergency department (ED) as their case definition, as it is . . . [Full text of this article]