Global Emergency Medicine: A Review of the Literature from 2019

Objective The annual systematic search of the peer-reviewed and gray literature relevant to global emergency medicine (EM) was conducted by the Global Emergency Medicine Literature Review (GEMLR) to screen, evaluate, and review the most rigorously conducted and relevant research in global EM published in 2019. Methods After a broad search of PubMed and websites of organizations publishing relevant gray literature, all articles that were deemed relevant to the fields of Disaster and Humanitarian Response, Emergency Care in Resource-Limited Settings, and Emergency Medicine Development by at least one reviewer, an editor, and the managing editors were then scored by two different reviewers using a 20-point scoring template relevant to either original research (OR) or review (RE) articles. This scoring system rates articles on their clarity, research design, ethics, importance to global EM, and breadth of impact. Articles which then scored in the top 5% were then critiqued in depth. Results A total of 23,321 article titles and abstracts were screened by 22 reviewers with a wide swath of clinical and research experience in global EM. From these, a total of 356 articles underwent full-text review and scoring on the 20-point scale; 26% were categorized as Disaster and Humanitarian Response, 58% as Emergency Care in Resource-Limited Settings, and 15% as Emergency Medicine Development. Of these 356 articles, 276 (77.5%) were original research articles and 80 (22.5%) were review articles. The sixteen articles which scored in the top 5% (>17.5 out of 20 points) received full in-depth narrative summaries. Conclusions In 2019, the overall number of studies relevant to global EM that were identified by our search decreased from the prior year, but more high-scoring articles related to the development of EM clinical practice and as a specialty in resource-constrained settings were identified.