Trip Database Blog

I saw a post about a new version on PBwiki and thought I’d try it out. So what have I put on there, various bits and bobs I’ve found interesting and useful over the years of answering clinical questions. So far there are not many pages and it’ll no doubt grow. This is not meant to be any significant new resource from TRIP, its just there as it’ll be useful to me and potentially for others.

To view the TRIPwiki click here.

Oh yes, you may get some screen suggesting an upgrade, this can be ignored by clicking on the link ‘take me to the wiki’ in the bottom right-hand corner.

As a new feature (to be rolled out shortly) we’ve produced a video of TRIP. It’s a quick run through the main features of TRIP, so new users can quickly get a feel of what we’re about.

We’ve placed it on YouTube, (as well as embedding it below) as you’ll see the quality is lousy – the resolution is too low. When we launch the video on TRIP it’ll be much higher in quality.

We added AFP to TRIP around ten days ago and it’s already (for me) proved a useful addition.

So what news greeted me ten minutes ago – restricted access (see below)! It’s not as draconian as it could be (only most recent 12 months will be restricted) but it’s a step back….

The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) has announced that beginning in April 2008, it will restrict online access to new issues of its journals, American Family Physician and Family Practice Management, to AAFP members and paid subscribers.

New journal articles will be restricted for a period of 12 months, after which time they will be available on the “public side” of www.aafp.org/afp and www.aafp.org/fpm, where 90% of the journals’ content will continue to reside. Previously, 100% of AFP and FPM content has been available online without a subscription.

TechCrunch highlights SearchMe. I like this! I’m not sure how useful it’d be for clinical search, but I still like it!!!

Around two weeks ago I blogged about TRIP being slow!

Today, I had a very good meeting with our web-team and we’ve located a key problem and highlighted a solution….

When someone does a search of TRIP it doesn’t just do one search it, in effect, does a search for each category (systematic reviews, EB synopses etc) – so that’s 9 searches! Last month we were searched 853,959 times, so the poor processors had to carry out 7,685,631 searches.

So the solution we’re going to work with is something called a rolling cache. This will cache a load of search results on a rolling 30 day basis. So, on day one, someone will search on asthma, we will do all 9 searches on that day (one for systematic reviews, one for EB synopses etc) but then those results will be stored in a cache. The next time someone searches on asthma we’ll take the results, not from carrying out the 9 searches, but from the cache. Bottom line we should see a significant improvement in speed…

Just as well as the rest of the meeting was discussing the 4 major projects that will be rolled out over the next year.

For interest, the NLH Mental Health Specialist Library has a google discussion group (click here).

I never suggest that I’m great at proof reading and the partial screenshot from the homepage proves this beyond doubt! Click on the picture to enlarge!

The Centre for Evidence Based Medicine, Oxford and TRIP are currently working on a joint project looking at the relationship between evidence and experience.

To start with we’re looking for clinicians with experience of treating depression or patients who have ever suffered from depression to undertake a brief online survey.

• Click here to take the survey
• Click here to return to TRIP

In February (a short month), the TRIP Database was searched 853,959 times. This beat our previous record (January 2008) by 131,242 searches. At the end of last year I predicted (optimistically) that we would reach one million searches per month by the end of 2008. If the current trend continues we should reach that easily (see the pretty graph below for trend data stretching back over 18 months).

TRIP is currently working on 4 major new projects, these will all impact on TRIP’s usage. Some will have major effects and some minor ones. One things for sure, I think we’ll need to invest in some new hardware!