Characteristics of the database
The CISDOC database is one of the world's richest collections of bibliographic information on occupational safety and health matters. It is important to realize what the word "bibliographic" means: CISDOC does not contain the full text of the documents it covers, instead, it has sufficient enformation in order to locate (and if need be, obtain) these documents, as well as a short summary (called an abstract) of each of them. There is also a set of indexig terms (called descriptors) associated with each record, enabling users to locate documents by drawing on controlled-vocabulary indexing terms drawn from a Thesaurus.
In order to improve the specificity of a search strategy within CISDOC, it is important to understand:
The individual elements of the CISDOC database are its records. Each record corresponds to a specific document that has been cited and analysed in the database. It is identified by two unique numbers: the document accession (or CIS) number (e.g. CIS 00-182) and the database record number (or ISN) (e.g. 74343).
- The document accession number is used to match up CIS references with the original documents they refer to; it is also the means of referring to other CIS records in a given record. The first two digits of this number (e.g. 00 in the example above) identify the last two digits of the year in which the citation was added to the database (in this case, 2000): as such it serves as a rough guide to its age. This is not 100% reliable, however - it is quite possible for a citation to be added to the database even decades after its publication.
- The database record number is essentially an accession number of a record within the database - it serves no purpose aside from being a unique identifier.
Each record in the CISDOC database can be divided into three main sections:
- Bibliographic section: This identifies the document's author(s), title, original title(s) (if it is not in English), publication details (publisher or journal title and issue, pagination details, ISBN etc.), numerotation in a series, whether there are illustrations or an index, price, URLs, language(s) it is written in.
- Abstract: A short description of the document's contents. This may be a listing of its main headings or a summary of its main findings (the latter is particularly useful in the case of journal articles reporting on research projects).
- Descriptors: The listing of the indexing terms chosen from the CIS Thesaurus, a collection of standard terms and phrases using controlled vocabulary. Controlled-vocabulary indexing has the advantage that the same object or concept is always referred to with the same word or phrase. CIS uses two levels of descriptors: primary and secondary. Primary descriptors refer to the main themes addressed by a document, whereas secondary descriptors refer to themes addressed in just one part of the document, or addressed only marginally. CIS also uses secondary descriptors to identify the type of document in question: LAW, TRAINING MANUALS, CD-ROM.
Each of these three sections is further subdivided into fields. A field is a collection of homogenous data: it may consist of the names of authors, or exact details concerning the publisher of a monograph or the issue of a journal. Each field is identified by a tag - e.g. TI is the tag for the field "Title" and PY is the tag for "Publication Year". Click here for a full list of tags with the corresponding field names and search operators.
CISDOC is the result of a very ambitious project: to assemble and analyse all of the significant world literature on occupational safety and health.
It is not, of course, possible to achieve this aim completely. No matter how much we try, some publications will escape our attention, while much duplicated information will find its way into CISDOC. The term "significant" can also be subject to different interpretations.
It is easier to define what we do not cover, however. By and large, the following safety and health related information is not covered by the CISDOC database (some exceptions may, however, creep in):
- The safety of nuclear reactors and nuclear research establishments, as well as that of the transport of radioactive substances and the disposal of radioactive waste. It is easy to see why we do not cover these: the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) already does an excellent job of covering these areas. CIS does, however, cover the risks of working with ionizing radiation sources in industry, as well as in health-care and educational institutions.
- Safety and health in the military.
- Safety in transportation. We consider that basic safety procedures and provisions in any branch of the transportation industry are so much part of their basic design, procedures and organization that CIS would be wasting its time covering safety-oriented documents related to this economic domain. However, we do cover topics such as tiredness at the driver's wheel and the transportation of dangerous goods.
- Purely environmental matters. Occasionally we may cover a chemical safety data sheet dealing with a substance not usually present in the workplace when it is part of a series that mostly deals with such substances.
- Toxicological studies not in direct relationship with the workplace.
In order to search the CISDOC database effectively, the following database production standards should be kept in mind:
- AUTHORS
- Only the surnames of authors are given, followed by their initials: Smith A.J.
- The spelling of authors' names is exactly as it is found in the publication that is being cited when the publication uses the Latin alphabet; when it uses a different writing system, we use a standard transliteration method. Users should keep in mind that the same author may therefore have his/her name spelled differently depending on the script used in the publication. For example, someone whose name is transliterated Šišackij in a Russian-language journal may spell his name Shishatskiy when he publishes in an English-language journal.
- When a document has one editor or several editors, the abbreviations ed. or eds., respectively, are appended to the names.
- TITLE
- The title of a document written in English is exactly as it is in the publication itself. Although we normally follow British spelling conventions, a document published in the US will be cited with its US spelling intact, i.e. fiber instead of fibre.
- The title of a document which is not in English is translated into English.
- When the document cited is in several languages one of which is English (e.g. Canadian laws), the title of its English version will be considered as its title.
- Subtitles will normally start with a capital letter and are normally separated from the main title by a colon, e.g.: Asbestos in brakes: Exposure and risk of disease (CIS 04-407).
- ORIGINAL TITLE
- Citations of documents that are not exclusively in English will, generally speaking, include their title(s) in languages other than English. Every original title is preceded by the appropriate 2-letter ISO code (e.g. FR for French, ES for Spanish, etc.).
- Just as with authors, original titles in languages not using the Latin alphabet are transliterated.
- CORPORATE AUTHOR
- Where a document is strongly associated with an organization that is not its publisher, we include the name of that organization in the bibliographic record.
- SERIAL TITLE
- In the case of articles in a journal or other serial publication, its name is always provided.
- When the ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) of a journal is known, we include that information in the database as well. With multilingual journals having more than one ISSN, we would normally include the ISSN associated with one language only (which tends to be the English-language version). As an example, the ISSN we provide for the Official Journal of the European Union - Journal officiel de l'Union européenne is the one for the English-language version: 1725-2555.
- PUBLICATION DETAILS
- For monographs, CIS supplies information on the publisher, including its address.
- For journal articles, CIS supplies information on the date of publication. For searching, note that months have standard 3-letter abbreviations: Jan., Feb. etc.
- Pagination and other details are also given for all documents, but these are unlikely to be used in searching strategies.
- Prices are given with the standard abbreviation of the currency: USD for the US dollar, CHF for the Swiss franc, EUR for the Euro, etc.
- ABSTRACT
CIS abstracts provide a fair amount of detail about the publications concerned, and they are fully searchable. Abstracts follow standard British orthography, with the following exceptions:
- The suffix -ize and its derivative -ization are used instead of -ise and -isation. Older records in the CIS database may, however, use the old spellings with -ise and -isation.
- Common words where CIS's spelling conventions are to be noted include: foetal, leukaemia, tumour. The word programme is spelled this way in all contexts except when dealing with a computer program.
- Official names of organizations and titles of documents cited in abstracts retain their original spelling. For example, any reference to the US Department of Labor retains its spelling (and does not spell it Department of Labour).
- The word analyse and its derivatives are spelled with -yse in CISDOC, however.
- Names of chemical substances are normally spelled the US way because of our reliance on Chemical Abstracts nomenclature. The spelling of the word sulfur is, in particular, to be noted here.
- An important convention in CIS abstracts involves the use of units in scientific and technical texts: the number and the unit are written together, without a space, e.g. 35cm, 25.6kg, etc. In order to avoid confusion between the numeral 1 (one), capital I and the lowercase letter l, the abbreviation for the unit litre is always spelled with the capital letter L in CISDOC: 35L, 1.25mL.
- INDEXING DESCRIPTORS
The descriptors associated with any CIS record use the spelling conventions of the CIS Thesaurus, which are basically the same as the spelling conventions used in the abstracts.