For Researchers
Notes on database coverage, search scope, and collaboration opportunities.
Database coverage
This database aggregates publicly available coronial findings from all Australian jurisdictions. While we endeavour to include all published findings, we cannot guarantee complete coverage. Official coronial repositories and depository services maintained by individual coroners' courts may have access to additional findings, unpublished information, and materials that are not publicly accessible and therefore not represented here. This resource should be treated as a convenience index rather than an authoritative or exhaustive archive.
What the search covers
The search function queries all structured metadata generated through automated tagging, including the AI-generated summary, clinical setting, specialty involved, hospital name, drug names, procedures, contributing factors, recommendations, and other extracted fields.
Notably, the search does not index the full text of coroners' reports. This is an intentional design decision rather than simply a technical limitation. Full-text search over unstructured legal documents tends to produce a high rate of false positives: for example, a finding that mentions a condition incidentally in a single line — such as a background history of prostate cancer in a case primarily concerning a medication error — would surface for any search on that condition, even though it has no material relevance to the case. Restricting search to curated, structured metadata produces more meaningful results for clinical and medico-legal learning purposes.
The automated tagging is AI-generated and may contain errors. If you identify an incorrectly tagged case, please let us know.
Research collaboration
For formal research purposes, I am open to collaboration. As the maintainer of this database, I can perform more comprehensive queries against the underlying dataset than the web interface permits — including full-text search across the complete corpus of coroners' reports. If you are undertaking research that would benefit from this level of access, please reach out via the contact page to discuss a collaboration arrangement.
How to cite
If Coronial was part of your method — you used the dataset, its summaries or tags, or searched it to identify your cases — please cite it as below, with the date you accessed it (the database is updated weekly). If you only used the site to locate a particular finding, cite that finding itself rather than Coronial.
Yew CY. Coronial: Australian coroners' findings database [Internet]. 2026 [cited year Mon day]. Available from: https://coronial.com.au
Yew, C.-Y. (2026). Coronial: Australian coroners' findings database [Data set]. Retrieved day Month year, from https://coronial.com.au
Publications
Peer-reviewed research drawing on Australian coronial findings, co-authored by the maintainer of this site.
- Lessons from preventable ICU-related coronial deaths: A large-language-model-assisted national analysis of adult cases in Australia (1997 to 2025)
Mendes HG, Bolouki Yazdi F, Yew CY, Gurgel AL
Journal of Critical Care 2027;97:155718 · doi:10.1016/j.jcrc.2026.155718Open access
Of 1,190 ICU-related coronial cases, 563 met a preventability criterion. Communication, handover and documentation failures were the most common failure mode (63.6%), and perioperative deaths carried the heaviest burden of multiple failures.
CSV export
All search result sets of 500 cases or fewer can be exported to CSV directly from the search interface. The export includes the full structured metadata for each case — including the AI-generated summary, all tagged fields, and source URL — which should assist researchers in efficiently screening and triaging cases without having to open each finding individually. To use this feature, apply filters or a search query to narrow results to 500 or fewer, then click the Export CSV button in the search toolbar.
Full dataset download
Need everything rather than a filtered slice? The complete dataset — every finding, all structured fields, and the AI-generated summaries — is published as a single CSV file, refreshed weekly. Please use it instead of crawling the site. Coronial is a self-funded public tool: every scraped page is a server request I pay for personally, and sustained scraping has already raised the hosting bill and taken the site down for the clinicians it exists for. One download replaces thousands of page loads.
- coronial-findings.csv.gz (gzip-compressed CSV; multi-valued fields are joined with “ | ”)
- README.txt (column guide, generation date, terms of use)
Free for research, education and journalism with attribution — please cite as shown above. Summaries and tags are AI-generated and may contain errors; refer to the original finding for anything that matters. For commercial use, full-text access, or a custom extract, please get in touch.