Effective construction of a database on toxicity information for nanoscale zinc oxide materials

Nanomaterials are commonly found in cosmetics, concrete, and car bumpers; however, there is not much data about their safety. Internet websites are abundant resources of environmental toxicology databases, and websites provide databases on human health and nanomaterial safety. PubMed is an important resource of scientific information and the OECD, CORDIS, EC Nanosafe, and ToxRefDB databases provide open access to related information on nanomaterials. This article focuses on internet-accessible resources pertaining to nanoscale zinc oxide. PubMed allows users to extract information on nanomaterials by inputting specific keywords, such as "safety", "hazard", "risk assessment", and "toxicity", along with "nanoscale zinc oxide". Official government and nongovernment websites provide webbased information on environmental toxicology, including risk assessments of nanomaterials. Extensive internet-accessible information, such as the original sources of data, published articles, and documents, and quality assurance should be considered when estimating the reliability of a website. In this study, a novel database was constructed for nanoscale zinc oxide, taking several web databases into consideration.