This database contains an extensive and growing set of references to articles and studies on extended producer responsibility (EPR) including publications from 1991 to the present. The current focus is on publications containing description and analysis of EPR, reflecting the research origins that motivated the collection of the documents.
The database has been developed bottom-up through automated and manual searches, contact with experts, monitoring of fora, and in some cases, serendipity. The database cannot be viewed as a systematic literature review and inferences should not be drawn based on the frequency, presence or absence of type of content.
What is and isn’t in the reference database
The database contains academic journal articles; books; book chapters; theses and dissertations; grey literature (i.e., reports from consulting firms, trade associations, advocacy groups, and companies), conference papers, and conference proceedings.
It does not include annual reports of producer responsibility organizations (PROs); PRO/stewardship plans; magazine and newspaper articles; webpages; court files and decisions; hearings; statutes; regulations; and presentations.
The database is politically neutral. Content includes publications by proponents and opponents of EPR and from university and think tank researchers, governments at all levels, industry groups, consulting firms, producers, waste companies, retailers, and environmental advocacy organizations. Inclusion in the reference database does not depend on ideological, political, or policy positions.
The emphasis of the database is on publications containing analysis. To be included, publications must contain more than news or simple statements of position. To ensure that the publication is appropriate for the database, the full text must be provided to the managers of the database if the reference is to be included.
New Content
Journal articles and other peer-reviewed publications are identified through automated searches of Web of Science (https://www.WebofScience.com). Grey literature is identified by monitoring developments in fora and activities related to EPR. Suggestions of additional references are welcome and can be provided via the webpage at https://epr-references.net/page/submit .
Search Functionality
The search function searches the title, abstract, authors, commissioning organization, and author's organization of the publications. Keywords are not included in the references at this time because of the complexity and resources required to curate a keyword lexicon.
Understanding the Display of References for Reports and Government Documents
Unlike academic journals and books, grey literature reports and government documents do not provide standardized bibliographic information about authors, publishers, web addresses, digital object identifiers (DOIs), and other metadata.
Also unlike academic publications, reports rarely include a short summary labeled or abstract. Some reports include an "executive summary"--often several pages in length--or a brief summary (simply labeled as a "summary"). Many reports have no summary whatsoever. In reports containing an executive or other type of longer summary, portions of those summaries have been excerpted verbatim and included in the Abstract/Summary field in the reference in order to help users quickly ascertain the content or focus of the publication.
In this database, the names of people who wrote reports are displayed in the Authors field rather than the organization for which they work or the publisher of the report. When an organization commissions a study, that organization is displayed in the Commissioning Organization field. If a consulting firm or other type of organization prepared the report but did not indicate the name of people that prepared the publication, its name is displayed in the Author’s Organization field.
The distinction between a report versus a government document is sometimes unclear, especially if a report is commissioned by a government but published by a consulting firm or other organization. Users should thus avoid drawing conclusions based on the relative number of different types of reference in the database.
How to get full text of reports and articles
Because Yale does not own the copyright to the documents indexed in the reference database, Yale cannot provide the full text of the documents. However, the references include links (URLs) to the location of the documents on the web. Some publications will be freely downloadable; others will be behind a paywall. For the latter, a copy can often be obtained through a request by email to the author(s).
Links to Google and Google Scholar on the webpages for the individual references are provided so that users can search for alternative sources of the documents, information about the authors, etc.