Comparison of 35 electronic databases for environmental risk assessment

The objective of this work is to classify and evaluate the major factual electronic databases that could be efficiently questioned for environmental risk assessment of various chemicals. A series of 35 databases available on commercial CD-ROMs and/or freely accessible on the Internet were listed and compared for the presence or absence of information for 27 environmental criteria. A factorial correspondence analysis indicated that most of the 35 databases are specialized in physicochemical, toxicological or ecotoxicological data but a few of them are nonspecialized databases able to answer simultaneously in various areas. We then evaluated these 35 databases by querying them for 14 selected test chemicals. It appeared that the percentage of chemicals being listed in the databases was very unequal and none of the 35 databases obtained 14 positive responses. The quality of the responses was determined by calculating the number of criteria being documented for the previously listed chemicals in each database. It suggested that HSDB, DOSE, TOMES, IPCS are the most efficient databases to be used for an urgent search of environmental data.