Reading list
Key research
Foundational and frequently cited publications on verbal autopsy methods and automated cause-of-death assignment. Each entry links to the original paper via its DOI.
Verbal autopsy methods and standards
These works define the method itself: how verbal autopsy evolved from a research technique into an international standard, and how the WHO instruments of 2016 and 2022 are structured for automated analysis.
- Fottrell E, Byass P. "Verbal autopsy: methods in transition."
Epidemiologic Reviews, 2010; 32: 38–55.
doi:10.1093/epirev/mxq003 - Nichols EK, Byass P, Chandramohan D, et al. "The WHO 2016 verbal autopsy instrument: an international standard suitable for automated analysis by InterVA, InSilicoVA, and Tariff 2.0."
PLoS Medicine, 2018; 15(1): e1002486.
doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1002486 - World Health Organization. "Verbal autopsy standards: the 2022 WHO verbal autopsy instrument."
WHO, Geneva, 2022.
who.int publication page
The InterVA models
The primary publications on the InterVA model — the 2012 release aligned with the WHO 2012 instrument, the 2019 InterVA-5 update for the WHO 2016 instrument, and an evaluation of the model against gold-standard validation data.
- Byass P, Chandramohan D, Clark SJ, et al. "Strengthening standardised interpretation of verbal autopsy data: the new InterVA-4 tool."
Global Health Action, 2012; 5: 19281.
doi:10.3402/gha.v5i0.19281 - Byass P, Hussain-Alkhateeb L, D'Ambruoso L, et al. "An integrated approach to processing WHO-2016 verbal autopsy data: the InterVA-5 model."
BMC Medicine, 2019; 17: 102.
doi:10.1186/s12916-019-1333-6 - Byass P. "Usefulness of the Population Health Metrics Research Consortium gold standard verbal autopsy data for general verbal autopsy methods."
BMC Medicine, 2014; 12: 23.
doi:10.1186/1741-7015-12-23
Other algorithms and toolkits
InterVA is not the only approach to computer-coded verbal autopsy. These papers cover InSilicoVA's data-adaptive Bayesian model, the Tariff method behind SmartVA, and the openVA toolkit that wraps all of them in a single R interface — see Tools for the software itself.
- McCormick TH, Li ZR, Calvert C, Crampin AC, Kahn K, Clark SJ. "Probabilistic cause-of-death assignment using verbal autopsies."
Journal of the American Statistical Association, 2016; 111(515): 1036–1049.
doi:10.1080/01621459.2016.1152191 - James SL, Flaxman AD, Murray CJL; Population Health Metrics Research Consortium. "Performance of the Tariff Method: validation of a simple additive algorithm for analysis of verbal autopsies."
Population Health Metrics, 2011; 9: 31.
doi:10.1186/1478-7954-9-31 - Serina P, Riley I, Stewart A, et al. "Improving performance of the Tariff Method for assigning causes of death to verbal autopsies."
BMC Medicine, 2015; 13: 291.
doi:10.1186/s12916-015-0527-9 - Li ZR, Thomas J, McCormick TH, Clark SJ. "The openVA toolkit for verbal autopsies."
The R Journal, 2023.
journal.r-project.org/articles/RJ-2023-020
Frequently asked questions
Which paper should I read first?
For the methodology, start with Fottrell & Byass (2010), "Verbal autopsy: methods in transition." For the current standard, read Nichols et al. (2018) on the WHO 2016 instrument. For the InterVA model itself, the InterVA-4 (2012) and InterVA-5 (2019) papers cover the two generations in active use.
Are these papers open access?
Most of them are. The PLoS Medicine, Global Health Action, BMC Medicine, Population Health Metrics, and R Journal articles listed here are open access; the DOI links lead to the publishers' pages where access terms are shown.
Does this site host the full texts or PDFs?
No. interva.net links to the original publications via their DOIs and does not host copies. Where a paper is paywalled, check whether the authors have posted an accepted manuscript in an institutional repository.
How were these publications selected?
They are the foundational and most frequently cited works on verbal autopsy standards and automated cause-of-death assignment — the papers a reader following a citation to interva.net is most likely looking for. Suggestions for additions are welcome via contact@interva.net.
For an accessible overview, see the Wikipedia article on verbal autopsy and the WHO verbal autopsy standards page.