Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education

A SUMMARY OF THIS MANUAL AND SUGGESTIONS FOR ITS USE

This is a manual about the tobacco industry documents released by US-based tobacco companies as a result of lawsuits filed against them in the USA. It may be used by persons with many interests:

• those simply wanting to know more about the subject

• those who would like to understand the mechanics of searching the documents without necessarily conducting searches themselves

• those who would like to learn, or sharpen, the skills needed to do a search.

The manual comes in the following sections. Readers may pick and choose according to their interests:

• an historical introduction: what the documents tell us about the behaviour and knowledge of the tobacco industry over the past 50 years; examples of quotes found in the documents; and how the documents have been used by tobacco-control advocates, international civil servants, academic researchers, journalists, legislators, policy-makers and lawyers;

• a listing of where tobacco industry documents may be found on the Internet; and a catalogue of collections of individual documents gathered by researchers on specifi c topics—such as nicotine and cigarette chemistry, marketing to youth, advertising, etc.—and where they may be found on the Internet

• a thorough explanation of how researchers extract information from the documents

• a step-by-step exercise based on an actual case to show the strategy of a successful search.

The manual also provides useful information in its annexes:

• an inventory of publications, based on original research into the documents (complete as of July 2004)

• for those intending to publish their research, a standard format for providing a reference to each document described

• a useful compendium of Internet addresses for a broad range of sources on tobacco-related information around the world—news, data, statistics, cigarette company web sites, etc.