LETTERS TO THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Page 180 The Australian National Coronial Information System: Limited By Quality of Data TO THE EDITOR The Australian National Coronial Information Sys- tem (NCIS) database provides a valuable resource (1). However, as for all databases, it is limited by the information that is provided to it (2). Our recent ex- perience accessing the NCIS database highlighted the ability to extract data was limited by ethics require- ments to access jurisdictions and data not having been uploaded, but the main failings resulted from a lack of standardization of postmortem examination reports between and within coronial jurisdictions. Australia has eight coronial jurisdictions (3). Tradi- tionally, a ‘“three-cavity” examination is performed, which requires examining the contents of the cranial, thoracic, and abdominopelvic cavities in addition to the neck and any other structures relevant to deter- mining the cause of death. Pathologists regard this as a “full” postmortem examination. If the extent of the postmortem examination is restricted (e.g., being confned to one cavity), such examinations are regard- ed as “partial” or “limited” by pathologists (3). An ex- amination may be external only. Our hypothesis was that changes to coronial legislation and approaches to the postmortem examination in Australia (3) would result in alteration in the proportion of full, partial, and external-only examinations over time and that this information could be extracted from the NCIS data- base. However, the type of postmortem examination (full, partial, or external) is not explicitly coded in the NCIS database. Since the NCIS system allows search- ing of postmortem reports by words and phrases, a search strategy to extract information was tested. Ap- proval was obtained from the Human Research Ethics Committee (H-2014-182) and the Justice Human Re- search Ethics Committee (M0286) to access the NCIS archived postmortem examination reports to identify