Every month I post a roundup of recent research into motorcycle safety. I’ve been asked from where I pull the information for each paper, so I wanted to post an answer to that question here that will enable readers to locate and use those sources themselves, and explore them as resources in their own right. I’ll post updates as the process is refined and improved.
The window for each roundup is the preceding four weeks, judged on the date a paper first appeared online rather than the issue it was later assigned to. A paper that was published online in July and printed in an October issue has usually been read and indexed already in these posts, so it does not count as new.
The search runs in two layers. The first queries research indexes directly: OpenAlex, Crossref, Europe PMC and arXiv, each filtered to the window and searched on several terms, among them motorcycle, motorcyclist, powered two-wheeler, moped and rider. Querying the indexes returns more than keyword search does. In September a search-only pass found one item; querying the same month directly returned six. The second layer covers the bodies that publish outside those indexes: in the UK I include the Department for Transport, TRL, PACTS and RoSPA; in Europe it’s ETSC, ACEM, SWOV and BASt; in the US I look at the NHTSA, IIHS and GHSA; in Canada, Transport Canada; and then the biomechanics conferences, IRCOBI and ESV. The list is long because a good deal of the most useful work on rider safety is agency and conference output, poorly indexed in the databases, so it has to be looked for separately.
Everything then goes through two filters. Each link must point at the individual paper or report, carrying a title, at least one author and either an abstract or a DOI, never a journal homepage or a search result. Then each candidate is checked against the previous three months of roundups to avoid duplication, largely because DOI registration and embargo lifts can push a paper into the next month’s results when it was already covered.
Where a paper reports a headline number I quote it, and where the authors limit what their findings support I say so. The aim is that you can tell from the summary whether a paper is worth your time, and go to the source if it is.
If you think a source is missing, email me.