PDMS (Pesticide Document Management
System)
(aka Document Citation)
PDMS contains information on over 350,000 documents that have been submitted to the EPA in support of pesticide registration. The collection of documents contains the technical information considered by the EPA/OPP scientists and regulatory officials in arriving at pesticide regulatory decisions. The search software for PDMS was originally designed in 1985 by the EPA to meet the needs of the registration standards program. It is the OPP's primary tool to manage the EPA internal archive of submitted documents.
When a document is submitted to the EPA, it is indexed by them in seven different ways to allow document retrieval. Each document is assigned a Master Record Identifier (MRID) by the EPA/OPP as it is entered into PDMS. The MRID is the key tracking method used for each document. The dates on these documents span almost 70 years.
The documents themselves are maintained by the EPA on microfiche and can be reproduced by submitting a list of MRIDs and citations to the EPA. Citations found in the database include submittal documents, laboratory research, analytical methods, and related documents submitted by pesticide registrants in support of their pesticide products, adverse effects documents, comments and studies from U.S. government laboratories, including reregistration eligibility documents, studies taken from published literature, and comments from interested parties.
In 1986, the EPA began closely regulating what documents must be submitted and the format that must be used by submitters. This provided a mechanism for uniform data tracking that has resulted in higher quality information in the database. PDMS, in addition to the primary search function, includes a report generation feature that produces summary reports.
The following are some ways to search PDMS:
PDMS Summary Reports can contain the following: