An Annotated Bibliography on the Attributable Risk

The attributable risk constitutes an important epidemiologic risk measure. In epidemiologic studies it quantifies the proportion of cases of disease due to the exposure factor under study. Hence, it assesses the public health importance of an exposure factor in the study population. The literature on the concept of attributable risk is diverse, appears in a variety of journals from different specialities, and most papers cite only a very limited part of it. In addition, it suffers from a substantial confusion in terminology and algebraic formulation. As a consequence, it is difficult to obtain an overview with respect to the statistical results relating to the concept. To remedy this problem, this paper provides an annotated bibliography containing a complete list of all references dealing with methodological aspects of the attributable risk.