Data from: Trauma data in conflict MENA Nations: An appeal for registry sharing

A scoping review of the literature was conducted to identify trauma registries that included information on injuries sustained by civilians and local combatants in the MENA conflict nations. The search was not restricted by date. Definitions were pre-determined to prevent ambiguity surrounding the concepts of trauma registries and the MENA conflict nations.

After the publications were identified, bibliometric analysis was performed on the large percentage of the articles indexed in the Web of Science database and published in journals indexed in Clarivate's Journal Citation Report (JCR).

The search was developed by a professional medical librarian in consultation with the author team; it included both keywords and subject headings representing the selected MENA nations, data, and trauma. The searches were independently peer reviewed by another librarian using a modified PRESS Checklist, and were conducted in MEDLINE via PubMed, Embase via Elsevier, Scopus via Elsevier, Global Health Database via EBSCOhost, and Web of Science via Clarivate.29 The searches were executed on January 10, 2023 and found 1,033 unique citations. Complete reproducible search strategies for all registries and the grey literature search plan are detailed in the Supplementary Materials. All citations were imported into Covidence, a systematic review screening software. PRISMA reporting guidelines were followed throughout.

The study focused on civilian victims within conflict zones. We excluded studies solely focused on military casualties. We included registries that contained demographics, processes of care, or outcomes of injured patients seen by a health care facility.

Countries of interest were selected based on geographic location in 21st century conflicts. Our list of conflict countries was defined by the World Bank's MENA nations list and its 2022 List of Fragile and Conflict-affected Situations.10,11 The following 6 nations were included in both lists: Lebanon, Gaza/West Bank, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya.