Searching the Literature: My Methods

I've recently completed a very broad literature search to find studies that look at the health impacts of e-waste recycling and dumping grounds, globally. The databases I searched included: Medline, EMBASE, Web of Science, GreenFILE, and Scholars Portal. I'm also in the process of looking through the reference lists of important papers, to see if my search has missed any pertinent studies. My initial search involved terms defining both e-waste and health, but I found that this excluded a number of important studies. Consequently, my final search only used keywords and MeSH terms that describe electronic waste.

For those of you that are interested, here is a breakdown of my search terms for Medline and EMBASE:

Electronics (exploded)
AND
Waste disposal (exploded) OR Waste products (exploded) OR Hazardous waste (exploded) OR Waste management (exploded) OR Industrial Waste (exploded) OR Waste* (Keyword) OR Recycl* (keyword)

In total, 1052 unique titles were retrieved from the database searches. A surprising number of these titles were duplicates even after de-duplicating electronically. After reviewing all of these titles and abstracts I was able to narrow this down to 193 titles. I did this by excluding those studies that did not explicitly state in the title or abstract that they were measuring the level of exposure to a particular hazard (i.e. lead) in the environment for which e-waste recycling or dumping is attributable. A number of the studies I eliminated looked at testing new recycling methods or equipment. There was also an extensive body of literature discussing the political and economic side of e-waste recycling and disposal.

I decided to narrow this down further to 40 studies by only including those studies that involved both a measure of the level of exposure to a toxin and a measure of a particular health outcome. Unfortunately, I could not retrieve full articles for 7 studies because they were either written in Chinese or not available without payment for the article. I sent an email to the authors of these articles, so I may gain access to them eventually.

I'm now working on synthesizing and pulling together the information in these studies. So far, I've noticed that there is a complete absence of studies from dumping grounds in countries such as Ghana; areas where the UN Environment Programme has expressed concerns about the illegal importation of e-waste.