• pedestrian injuries

Editor,—My attention has been drawn to above article by Wazana et al.¹ I was disappointed to find that only the MEDLINE database had been searched for what was effectively an area of transport related accident research. Though I note that the authors acknowledged this limitation and sought to augment their search by searching through the references of retrieved articles, I believe many relevant articles were probably not retrieved that would have been had one of the most relevant databases for the subject area, namely the International Road Research Documentation (IRRD) database been consulted in addition to MEDLINE. A search by one of the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) information scientists retrieved some 140 references from a similar 10 year section of the English language part of the IRRD database. Further references in French or German could have been retrieved from the publicly available versions of IRRD (online via the STN host or as part of the SilverPlatter Transport CD-ROM).

I hope other researchers in this field will take note and utilise the massive information resource that IRRD comprises (as well as abstracts of published information, summaries of ongoing research are also included). IRRD centres throughout the world such as TRL in the UK will be pleased to assist researchers by either carrying out searches of IRRD for them or helping them to access the online or CD-ROM versions of the database.

For further information of services TRL can provide see our web site at http://www.trl.co.uk and for information about the online version of the IRRD database see http://www.fiz-karlsruhe.de or for information about the Transport CD-ROM see http://www.silverplatter.com