Tobacco industry documents: comparing the Minnesota Depository and internet access.

OBJECTIVE To assess the comparability of searches conducted on two publicly available tobacco industry document collections: hard copies housed and maintained by a neutral party in the Minnesota Depository and electronic copies available through tobacco industry maintained websites. METHODS We conducted a set of searches in Minnesota and then conducted the same searches using the industry websites. We matched documents by Bates number, weeded out duplicates, and coded documents that were unique to either collection as major, minor, or trivial. RESULTS Among hundreds of documents produced by several searches, we found only four unique major documents in the Minnesota Depository. By contrast, we found 62 unique major documents using the websites. CONCLUSION These results suggest that researchers can rely on industry websites while waiting for improved access resulting from searching, indexing, and document storage administered by the tobacco control community. Searching the tobacco industry websites is at least as good as searching in Minnesota and may in some instances actually be better. Four smaller subcollections, however, can only be searched by hand in Minnesota.