This annotated bibliography was prepared at the request of the Health Education and Promotion Unit (HEP) of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Geneva, to the WHO Collaborating Centre for Health Promotion at the University of Toronto. The goal was to prepare a bibliography on health promotion that would be useful to both the participants of the 4th International Conference on Health Promotion (4th ICHP) "New Players for a New Era: Leading Health Promotion into the 21st Century", Jakarta, July 1997, and the overall work within the WHO five year plan of action for health education and promotion.
We started with an "Annotated Bibliography of Selected Health Promotion and Health Education Titles" that was prepared by HEP in collaboration with the WHO Library, WHO Geneva in March 1995. From this bibliography we selected key references published in 1990 or later. Irving Rootman, Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre in Toronto, sent an electronic message to other WHO Collaborating Centres in Health Promotion inviting submission of items for the bibliography. We also searched the catalogues of the University of Toronto Libraries for suitable materials.
In order to keep the bibliography to a manageable size, we limited the coverage for the most part to general health promotion books and technical reports published since 1990 and gave priority to WHO and other international publications. Specialized titles within health promotion such as schools, AIDS/HIV, workplace health, and aging were not included unless they appeared to be comprehensive or standard works. Journal articles were included if they were substantive reviews. A selected list of journal titles that publish health promotion articles was also included. Short annotations were included wherever possible; longer abstracts were included if provided by the contributor. A unique addition to this bibliography is a list of health promotion Web sites that provide access to many more sources of information beyond this bibliography.
The language of the bibliography is English. If a publication was known to be available in languages other than English, this was noted.
Since electronic mail was used as the method of submission and the language of the bibliography is English, we are aware that direct contributions from colleagues who are not connected to the Internet or did not publish in English were restricted. Despite these limitations, we trust that this bibliography will be useful not only to the 4th International Conference on Health Promotion but to serve as an important basis for future information sharing activities.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the organizers of the 4th International Conference on Health Promotion, in particular Desmond O'Byrne, Chief, and Ursel Broesskamp-Stone, both from the Health Education and Promotion Unit, WHO Geneva; as well as the WHO Library, Geneva; and others who suggested entries for the bibliography.
Note: The Internet URLs (http://...) in this document were last checked on June 27, 1997.