Background: Within occupational health, research has tended to
concentrate on sickness absence. However, there is increasing recognition
of the impact poor health may have on work performance (‘presenteeism’).
The diversity of the research, indexing in major databases and of the
terminology used in occupational health presents multiple challenges in
systematically gathering the evidence on performance. Objectives: To
systematically search for research assessing the impact of employee health
on work performance; to provide a resource for focussed systematic
reviews of this literature; to examine the usefulness of The Cochrane
Library for identifying this literature. Methods: A comprehensive, sensitive
search strategy was developed for electronic bibliographic databases:
MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, The Cochrane Library, AMED, PsycInfo,
DHData, King’s Fund Database, Science Citation Index, and Social Science
Citation Index. Search results were imported into Reference Manager,
duplicates from the different databases were noted and removed. An
information specialist assessed titles for relevance, and two people
evaluated the abstracts independently. Occupational Health departments,
experts and organisations were contacted for unpublished reports. Key
occupational journals were handsearched. Results: A total of 19,275
unique references were identified from sensitive searches of the electronic
databases. After assessing all titles and abstracts, the final bibliography
included 1763 references. The Cochrane Library yielded 249 (14.1%) of
the final database. Of these, 99 (40%) were not found in any of the other
databases. Almost two thirds of the final database was identified in
MEDLINE (1064 records, 59%), 446 (42%) of which were not found in any
other databases. Conclusions: MEDLINE appears to be the most
important database for identifying published occupational health research.
However, The Cochrane Library made an important contribution to the
final database, even though the search was not limited to intervention
studies. The systematic search of the electronic bibliographic databases
produced a vast amount of published literature and a number of
methodological challenges. Managing large volumes of references took
far longer than anticipated and caused software problems. The resulting
systematic bibliography with specialised keywords is an important resource
for conducting systematic reviews of the effect of employee health on
work performance.