The search yielded 1107 articles, of which 130 were duplicates. The remaining 977 titles and abstracts were inspected to determine if they fulfilled our preliminary inclusion criteria: (1) original research, (2) blunt chest trauma, including articles that enrolled a mixture of blunt and penetrating chest trauma, or polytrauma, (3) any intervention for the treatment of blunt chest trauma, (4) included a comparator, (5) contained measured outcomes, and (6) the abstract was in English. 65 potentially relevant articles were identified. The full text articles were then obtained and reviewed by each author to ensure all inclusion and exclusion criteria were met. One article was unable to be retrieved, as a full manuscript had not been published.