Inventory of Sources of Scientific Evidence Relevant to EFSA's Risk Assessments and Information Sessions on Literature Searching Techniques (CFT/EFSA/SAS/2011/03 Inventory Report)

Regulation (EC) No 178/2002 recommends that risk assessments are undertaken by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) in an independent, objective and transparent manner, on the basis of all available scientific information and data. The systematic review (SR) method implemented by EFSA to inform risk assessment models ensures a methodologically rigorous stepwise process, minimising biases and emphasising transparency and reproducibility. To minimise bias, SRs include an extensive literature search. Locating all relevant information sources can be problematic and missing relevant scientific information may influence SR conclusions. The EFSA Scientific Assessment Support Unit contracted YHEC (CFT/EFSA/SAS/2011/03) to produce five deliverables to support literature searching to inform SRs of food and feed safety. This report describes the development of an inventory of information sources of relevance to systematic reviews of food and feed safety. The inventory uses a metadata schema to record information about each information source. 376 candidate information sources were identified from the EFSA SAS inventory of information sources and other catalogues and websites. The selection of information sources to include in the EFSA inventory were determined using selection criteria (1) relevance to EFSA research areas (2) currency of information in the information source (3) provision of searchable bibliographic data records or full text reports of research and (4) be accessible to EFSA staff. Metadata were identified and recorded in an Excel spreadsheet for the 199 information sources meeting these four criteria.