International Law Systematic Review Dataset v1.0

International treaties are often used by countries to address concerns that cross national boundaries, including the environment, human rights, humanitarian crises, maritime issues, security and trade. While over 250,000 international treaties exist, no study has ever compiled and analyzed decades of research assessing their effectiveness. Ten electronic bibliographic databases were searched from inception to December 2017: Applied Social Sciences Index & Abstracts, CINAHL, Global Health, International Bibliography of Social Sciences, International Political Science Abstracts, MEDLINE, PAIS International, Social Sciences Abstracts, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Worldwide Political Science Abstracts. The study selection included publicly available peer-reviewed studies and gray literature (e.g., dissertations) that aimed to quantitatively measure an international treaty’s effect on any objective and quantifiable outcome. Further details on the review of titles and abstracts for eligibility, final consensus for inclusion, aggregation and deduplication using EndNote, and assessment for bias using Cochrane’s ROBINS-I tool are found in SI Appendix. This dataset contains information on treaty characteristics from 199 unique quantitative estimates evaluating 53 unique treaties. At the time of study inception, there was no existing systematic field-wide evidence synthesis that could provide the information upon which to evaluate the effects of international treaties. Further details are available in the accompanying article: Hoffman SJ, Baral P, Rogers van Katwyk S, Sritharan L, Hughsam M, Randhawa H, Lin G, Campbell S, Campus B, Dantas M, Foroughian N, Groux G, Gunn E, Guyatt G, Habibi R, Karabit M, Karir A, Kruja K, Lavis JN, Lee O, Li B, Nagi R, Naicker K, Røttingen J, Sahar N, Srivastava A, Tejpar A, Tran M, Zhang Y, Zhou Q, Poirier MJP. International treaties have mostly failed to produce their intended effects. PNAS. 2022 Aug 2; 119;32 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2122854119 Statement of Contributions: Designed research: S.J.H. Performed research: S.J.H., P.B., S.R.V.K., L.S., M.H., H.R., G.L., S.C., B.C., M.D., N.F., G. Groux, E.G., G. Guyatt, R.H., M.K., A.K., K.K., J.N.L., O.L., B.L., K.N., R.N., J.-A.R., A.T., M.T., N.S., A.S., Y.-q.Z., Q.Z., M.J.P.P. Contributed new reagents/analytic tools: S.J.H., S.R.V.K., G.L., G.G., Q.Z., M.J.P.P. Analyzed data: S.J.H., G.L., Q.Z., M.J.P.P. Wrote the paper: S.J.H., P.B., S.R.V.K., L.S., M.H., H.R., G.L., S.C., B.C., M.D., N.F., G. Groux, E.G., G. Guyatt, R.H., M.K., A.K., K.K., J.N.L., O.L., B.L., K.N., R.N., J.-A.R., A.T., M.T., N.S., A.S., Y.-q.Z., Q.Z., M.J.P.P. We thank A. Agarwal, N. Jedrzejko, V. Lui, N. Natt, J. Petropoulos, and J. Syrotuik for their help with developing the search strategy; P. Alexander for contributing to risk of bias assessment; as well as M. Chen (Chinese), A. Yu (Chinese), W. Boer (Dutch), T. Huijits (Dutch), J. Bailey (German), S. Schandelmaie (German), C. Barbui (Italian), A. Iorio (Italian), A. Skordai (Hungarian), and J. J. Yepes-Nu~nez (Spanish) for their assistance with text translations. Funding was provided by Research Council of Norway’s Global Health & Vaccination Programme GLOBVAC Project 234608 (to S.J.H.); Canadian Institutes of Health Research 172982 (to S.J.H.); and Ontario Government’s Ministry of Research, Innovation & Science ER16-12-197 (to S.J.H.).