WWW-publications from the WHO MONICA Project

About WWW-publications from the WHO MONICA Project

The epidemiological results from the WHO MONICA Project are published primarily in peer-reviewed scientific journals. "WWW-publications from the WHO MONICA Project" is an electronic publication series with the purpose to facilitate full publication of and easy access to the comprehensive supplementary material which is essential for the scientific justification of the epidemiological results. The series also publishes epidemiological results which are too bulky for journals. The current four categories of the WWW-publications are:

• The Manual, which describes the objectives, organization and the data collection procedures of the Project.
• Comprehensive reports which assess the quality of the data and hence the extent of success of the standardization of the data collection.
• Data books, which provide detailed descriptive statistics for each MONICA population on the data collected in the Project.
• Appendices to papers published in journals. These may describe details of the methods used to derive the results published in the journals, or they may provide additional tables or figures which are too bulky for publication in the journals. Most journals also publish such web appendices, but these are often inaccessible to others than subscribers of the journals and often they are also difficult to find. The MONICA Project prefers this series for such appendices because here they can be found easily using the fixed URL, they can be accessed by all who have an access to the Internet, and the standardized format and the review process of this series guarantee better quality of the appendices than many journals.

The editor of the series is Dr. Kari Kuulasmaa. The publications of the series are subject to the Publication Rules of the MONICA Project. In particular, before approval for publication, they are reviewed by two or three reviewers, usually selected from the Centres of the Project, and they are approved by the MONICA Steering Committee and the MONICA Centres whose unpublished data were used.

The series is published by the National Institute for Health and Welfare, Finland (THL) on behalf of the World Health Organization and the WHO MONICA Project investigators. THL assures that the publications can be found in the given Uniform Resource Location (URL) as long as possible. Each publication also has a Uniform Resource Name (URN) issued by the National Library of Finland. If the URL ceases from responding at some stage, the publications should still be traceable through the URN. Each publication is equipped with the Dublin Core metadata.

Every publications has a hyperlink to its copyright statement, which may vary slightly between the publications.