Introduction: World-wide, over a million people die and over ten million people are permanently disabled each year in road traffic crashes. According to the WHO Global Burden of Disease Study this year some 280,000 children under the age of fifteen will die in road traffic crashes, most of whom will be injured as pedestrians. Changes in traffic volume and traffic speed, effected by area traffic calming schemes or alterations to the road hierarchy, and educational or training interventions are believed to have a potential for preventing traffic crashes and pedestrian injuries. However, uncontrolled studies of these interventions may be confounded by secular trends, such as the decline in pedestrian activity and changes in driver behaviour, and are vulnerable to regression towards the mean. The true effect of traffic engineering and educational measures is probably best established by systematically identifying, reviewing, and synthesising results from controlled intervention studies, a process which presents substantial methodological and terminological challenges. Problems: First, reports of road safety evaluation studies are published in a diverse range of journals and other sources covering subjects such as road safety, town planning, transportation, political studies, geography, psychology, education, criminology, epidemiology, public health, medicine, and others. Second, many reports of road safety evaluative studies are only published as 'grey' (difficult to obtain) literature of the various road safety and road planning organisations and are not necessarily indexed in generally accessible databases or catalogues. Third, existing road safety databases use diverse indexing systems, with little cross-database consistency of subject terms or keywords. Fourth, these database have a very limited range and conflicting use of indexing terms describing the study methodology. Fifth, road safety evaluation studies are published in a wide range of languages without an easily recognisable standard terminology. In this presentation, the problems will be elaborated, strategies to overcome them described, and applied to databases containing references to road safety intervention studies, including TRIS, IRRD, Transdoc, and SSCI. Suggestions to improve bibliographic control of effective traffic engineering and educational intervention studies on these databases will be presented and a small database of controlled studies aiming at reducing pedestrian injuries will be introduced.

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