During the 1970s, occupational disease research coalesced around cohort-based epidemiology, prioritizing prospective follow-up, standardized exposure metrics, and mortality and cancer incidence outcomes. Researchers grappled with biases inherent in comparing workers to the general population, notably the healthy worker effect, and increasingly integrated linkage systems to connect job titles with exposure agents. The period saw a unification of industrial cohorts with a focus on methodological rigor to quantify risk across diverse worker groups.