An already valuable online tool for environmental journalists has become considerably more useful.

The Environmental Health News website recently added a powerful new search engine, allowing site visitors to hunt through the thousands of news stories and opinion articles in its archives and hundreds of advocacy group reports and studies.

Environmental Health News presents daily, linked summaries of environmental coverage from dozens of publications around the world – usually, articles relating to its primary focus on pollution and environmental contaminants.

Each day, the site highlights several dozen articles in an impressive, but also sometimes dauntingly extensive, list. The new search engine will help users – particularly occasional visitors or those on a particular research mission – sift through the voluminous offerings.

The left side of EHN's Archives page contains the engine, which enables customized searches using combinations of the multiple categories under which articles have been classified in the site's database.

For instance, a simple search for the appearance of the keyword "dioxin" in editorials recently produced a list of 12 items in news outlets ranging from the Marion (Indiana) Chronicle-Tribune to the Los Angeles Times.

Alongside summaries of the editorials were updated options for further refining the search. Choosing one of them – "drinking water" in a sub-list of different types of infrastructure that might be related to dioxin exposure – narrowed the search results to one editorial in the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Another possible search method involves mixing various article categories at the outset.

One such search went like this: News stories about synthetic chemicals, with air as a possible exposure pathway, relating both to ecosystem effects and testicular cancer in humans.

The result was two articles, one in the New York Times and another in the St. Petersburg Times, which was reprinted in the Lakeland (Florida) Ledger.

A huge number of search combinations are possible, with choices possible for type of article (or report), environmental issue, human health condition, contamination agent, exposure pathway, ecological effect, infrastructure, solution (such as "activism" and "regulatory"), type of "emerging science" (such as "endocrine disruption"), location of coverage, name of publication, and date published.

The Environmental Health News website went online in June 2003. About 13 months later, its database included summaries and links for more than 30,000 documents, including nearly 20,000 news stories, nearly 1,000 editorials and more than 500 opinion pieces. The remainder comprised nearly 400 organization reports and scientific studies.

The site is produced by Pete Myers, former senior vice president for science at the National Audubon Society and co-author of "Our Stolen Future," through the not-for-profit Environmental Health Sciences.

For a more detailed profile of Environmental Health News, see the April 2004 issue of Environment Writer (Download the issue).