Today I instructed Phil to start work on the latest upgrade to Trip.  This will see the following new features:

  • RCT filter.  On Trip we have a systematic review filter but it’s a bit odd, given the prominence in the EBM world, that we have no RCT filter. However, in order to do this we have to build a decent collection of RCTs which we’re also having to do.  We’ll mostly grab content from PubMed but we’re also exploring other options/databases.  We’re hoping to have at least 500,000 RCTs by the time we launch.
  • Full-text link outs.  In our user surveys the desire to link to full-text has been a consistent request and, at last, we are able to act on this.  We are using two main techniques:
    • PubMed Central (PMC) is a repository of full-text, freely available articles organised by the National Library of Medicine (who also supply PubMed).  We currently link to PubMed for all our abstracts to primary research articles.  So, we’re going to cross-reference our PubMed holdings with PMC and link to the full text on PMC (if it exists).
    • Institutional holdings.  Many users work in institutions that have paid for full-text.  So, we will offer the ability for institutions to work with us to allow their users to seamlessly link with full-text articles the institution has purchased.
  • LMIC. This stands for Low and Middle Income Countries and we want to add a specific filter to identify evidence suitable for such areas.  
  • Relevancy filter.  A search in Trip returns ALL results that match a search query – even if the search term is only mentioned once in a ten thousand word document. We would consider that document as having low relevancy to the search. We will remove these low relevancy results. If there are lots of results (say over 100) we remove all results with very low relevancy. If we get over 250 results we remove all results with low relevancy. All this would be undoable (ie show all results) at the push of a button.

Hopefully these will be released by the end of February.