US EPA - PPCPs Bibliographic Citation Database - Synopsis of Project — This on-going project provides a comprehensive, publically accessible bibliographic listing of literature citations that are directly or peripherally relevant to the many aspects of pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) as environmental contaminants. The listing of bibliographic citations is currently available in both TXT and PDF versions from the US EPA's PPCPs web page: http: //www. epa. gov/ppcp/lit .html. A much more comprehensive and versatile version is available to EPA researchers as a full digital database, which is compiled using commercial bibliographic citation software. An abbreviated version of the electronic database (which includes full abstracts but not PDF reprints of the individual references) is available to the public [for more information, contact: daimhton.christian a epa.govl. To cite this page or the database: Daughton CG and Scuderi MST, 2013. "Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products (PPCPs): Bibliographic Database of Relevant Published Literature," U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Las Vegas, Nevada (a comprehensive database of literature references compiled and curated by Daughton and Scuderi; first implemented 19 February 2008); available: http: //www .epa. gov/ppcp/lit .html The compiled PPCPs literature citations cover all facets of the risk paradigm (including: Origins, Sources, Occurrence, Transport, Fate, Exposure, Effects, Stewardship, Pollution Prevention, Monitoring, Waste & Water Treatment Technologies, Risk Assessment, Risk Communication, etc.) as well as many aspects that are peripherally related (e.g., major citations dealing with low-dose effects, mixture effects, and databases for medications, physicochemical properties, and toxicology, among others). The scope of the covered literature spans not just journal articles, but also books (and book chapters), proceedings, databases, web pages, reports, miscellaneous gray literature, and select presentations and news stories. By default, the scope of the database also includes many documents on emerging contaminants, as PPCPs are often included as a subset of contaminants of concern. In May of 2010, the main PPCPs database of published literature exceeded 10,000 entries, making it more cumbersome to perform searches (or browse) for those restricted to working with the text-based reference files. Since one of the main aspects of the PPCPs topic that attracts broad interest involves drug disposal and environmental stewardship, the subset of references that pertain to the many aspects of this specific aspect of PPCPs were compiled in a separate listing (termed the DDS database)-, note, however, that these references will remain an integral part of the main PPCPs listing since many of them are also relevant to other aspects of the general topic. This new listing devoted to drug disposal and stewardship provides comprehensive coverage of the many issues that touch upon this subject - one that is intertwined with a bewildering array of factors involving society's relationship with drugs, including: manufacturing (e.g., drug formulation), packaging, prescribing practices and customs, dispensing practices (including the health insurance industry), design of drug delivery (especially delivery devices), consumer behavior (numerous behaviors that lead to the generation of leftover drugs, a major one being patient non-compliance/adherence), drug collection programs (e.g., take-backs), poisonings (human and animal), diversion, expiry (including stability testing), environmental stewardship, pollution prevention, and legislation, among many others. As of 14March 2013, the DDS database comprised 1,955 references, representing about 12.5% of the total PPCPs database. 14 March 2013 Synopsis: US EPA PPCPs Bibliographic Citation Database page 1 of 4 ------- The major advantage of the PDF versus the TXT version of the literature listings from the database is that it serves as a simple, but effective searchable database. Character-string searches can almost instantly locate all of the citations containing a keyword or expression; when using Acrobat, users must select "use advanced search options" (located at the bottom of the basic search panel). The full first line of context for each hit is displayed in the search panel, allowing fast visual examination of the results, as well as instantly locating the citation. The TXT version is useful for importing as a character-delimited file directly into any of the many available commercial bibliographic citation databases. A typical entry in the public listing (for a journal article) displays the full citation information in the following format: Kolpin DW, Furlong ET, Meyer MT, Thurman EM, Zaugg SD, Barber LB, et al. "Pharmaceuticals, hormones, and other organic wastewater contaminants in U.S. streams, 1999-2000: a national reconnaissance," Environmental Science & Technology 2002, 36(6): 1202-1211; doi: 10.1021/esO 11055j. The need for a PPCPs citation database was born from the difficulties in performing comprehensive literature searches and the incompleteness of all commercial published-literature databases and inadequacies of Internet search engines for this topic. One of the major inefficiencies in the development and advancement of the PPCPs field is the difficulty in distilling the large and continually growing body of literature into useful knowledge. The published literature contains a wealth of data and insights. Major portions have never been examined or summarized and evaluated. Lack of a comprehensive bibliographic database is one of the reasons; another reason is that synoptic reviews and compilation of databases, although invaluable, are generally not valued in science as much as the publication of new data. For more perspective on the growth of the published PPCPs literature and on the importance of knowledge mining, see the following two articles: Page 2491 in: Daughton CG "Chemicals from the Practice of Healthcare: Challenges and Unknowns Posed by Residues in the Environment," Environmental Toxicology & Chemistry 2009, 28(12):2490-2494; doi:10.1897/09-138.1; available: http://www3.interscience.wilev.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/123234134/PDFSTART Daughton, C.G. "Literature Forensics? Door to What Was Known but Now Forgotten," Environmental Forensics 2001, 2: 277-282; doi: 10.1006/enfo.2001.0065; available: http://www.epa.gov/nerlesdl/bios/daughton/forensics.pdf [Also see follow-up commentary: Daughton, C.G. "Literature Forensics: Navigating through Flotsam, Jetsam, and Lagan," The Scientist 2002, 16(4): 12 (Feb. 18); available: http://www.the-scientist.com/7articles.view/articleNo/13842/title/Literature-Forensics-Navigating- Through-Flotsam-Jetsam-and-Lagan/1 Even with commercially available scientific literature databases, and with the growing power and comprehensiveness of free search engines such as Google Scholar, coupled with ever-expanding Internet content, locating literature specific to PPCPs can be extremely difficult because of the complexities in filtering out the countless search results that are not relevant to PPCPs as environmental contaminants; these irrelevant search results are usually pertinent instead to healthcare, clinical research, clinical practice, pharmacy, or human and veterinary pharmacology. Locating the relevant literature is one of the major challenges to maintaining a literature database on PPCPs. It is not a topic conducive to quick key-word searches of the undistilled literature. Use of cited-citation analysis (e.g., using Science Citation Index or Google Scholar's "cited by" feature) - based on highly cited relevant publications as the starting point - is one of the more direct ways to locate and compile the relevant literature. But cited-citation analysis is a very time-consuming task and one that must be performed on an ongoing basis. Currently, the limitations of the PPCPs bibliographic database are: (i) lack of comprehensive coverage of the non-English literature (which may be extensive), (ii) abstracts, URLs, DOIs, or PDFs are missing for a limited number of citations, and (iii) lingering typographic errors and formatting inconsistencies, as well as errant duplicate entries, prove difficult to eliminate entirely. 14 March 2013 page 2 of 4 Synopsis: US EPA PPCPs Bibliographic Citation Database ------- The EPA in-house digital database (from which the text files are exported) is updated on nearly a daily basis. The public version text files, accessible from the PPCPs web site, are updated periodically (roughly every 3 months). New additions include not just the newly published and in-press literature, but also many past publications that had not yet been captured as well as corrections and updates to existing entries. As of 14March 2013, the PPCPs literature database contained citations for 15,690 references. In part, these comprised 11,473 journal articles, 1,065 reports, 844 books/chapters, 423 theses, 378 web sites/pages, 160 government documents (not including reports), and 112 databases. In the on-line text version of the database, 97% of the entries had DOIs or URLs (allowing direct access to full articles - assuming the end- user has subscription access); for a DOI locator, see: http://www.crossref.org/. In the complete digital version of the database, 94% had abstracts and 91% had PDFs (usually of the complete article). The PPCPs Bibliographic Literature Citation Database should prove useful to anyone with an interest in this field, as it makes locating pertinent references much easier. For EPA scientists having bibliographic citation software, the most recent version of the complete PPCPs Bibliographic Literature Citation Database can be obtained by contacting Christian Daughton (daughton.christian@epa.gov). The size of the complete database (about 6.5GB) restricts distribution to shipment via solid state drives (SSD); for the public, the size of the database (without PDFs) is only about 32.5MB, which allows distribution via a file-sharing service. Some of the advantages of using the electronic database (instead of the simple text listings of citations available on this web page) are: (1) References can be effortlessly cited and formatted in MS Word documents using on-the-fly citation capabilities. (2) References can be formatted in whatever style is required (for example, to meet a journal's requirement for submitting manuscripts). (3) Abstracts and PDFs (when available) can be searched on full text and directly accessed (searching all attached PDFs requires additional third-party software - or EndNote X4 or later); "deep" full-text searching allows ready retrieval, for example, of documents that mention rare terms (such as seldom-used active pharmaceutical ingredients). (4) Queries can be restricted to a specific type of publication (e.g., books, journal articles, reports, theses, etc.) or field (e.g., all papers authored by a particular scientist). (5) Boolean searches can be performed; as one example, "ethynyl OR ethinyl" finds all citations containing: ethynylestradiol, ethynyl estradiol, ethinylestradiol, or ethinyl estradiol, together with all the variants with oestradiol. updated: 14 March 2013 14 March 2013 Synopsis: US EPA PPCPs Bibliographic Citation Database page 3 of 4 ------- Update History of PPCPs Bibliographic Citation Database (number of records in database): 2008 5,471: 28 August 5,663: 11 September 5,865: 22 October 6,100: 12 November 6,440: 9 December 2009 7,094: 19 February 7,548: 4 May 7,985: 30 July 8,882: 2 December 2010 9,561: 11 March 10,096: 20 May 10,700: 12 August 2011 11,454: 21 January 11,881: 28 April 12,419: 22 July 12,976: 8 November 2012 13,598: 1 March 14,358: 28 June 14,898: 4 October 2013 15,690: 14 March 14 March 2013 Synopsis: US EPA PPCPs Bibliographic Citation Database page 4 of 4 ------- |