What started out as a minor upgrade has turned into something altogether more substantial. I posted much of the detail a few weeks ago, but as we start work things develop.  We’re still hoping to get the upgrade out by the end of February (depending on testing) and the main new features will be:

  • RCT filter.  It struck me, given their prominence in the ‘evidence based’ world, as strange that we didn’t have an RCT filter.  So, why not have one and why not make it wonderful.  So, we’re going to grab RCTs from multiple sources and hopefully launch with at least 500,000 RCTs making it one of the biggest RCT databases. Invariably the largest FREE RCT database.
  • Full-text.  The ability to better link to full-text has been a major request from clinician users of Trip.  So, we’re going to make it much easier for users to navigate from the primary research articles to full-text (we currently just point to abstracts).  We plan to do this in two ways:
      1. Better integration with PubMed Central, the full-text sibling of PubMed.
      2. Working with organisations to allow users to link to their institutions full-text collections.
  • LMIC (Low and Middle Income Countries) filter.  We’ve worked on this idea in the past but this takes a new approach.  We’ll be using the LMIC filter highlighted by the Norwegian Satellite of the Cochrane Effective Practice and Organisation of Care Group (see here). It’s not validated but it needs to be put out there, tested and then – hopefully – improved upon.  It should make the identification of evidence for LMICs much easier.
  • DynaMed. This is not certain, but we’re hopeful, that users of DynaMed will be able to search Trip and see DynaMed content in their search results.
  • Case Reports. Perhaps at the lower end of the evidence spectrum, we’ll be introducing case reports from the really interesting Cases Database.
  • Low relevancy cut-off. 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. I would consider that document as having low relevancy to the search.  So, we’re going to remove all articles with a low relevancy score.  Users, if they want can reintroduce them, can do so with minimal effort!

Fingers crossed that testing goes well.

Related to that is a brief survey we’re doing mainly around how to position the full-text offering.  Six questions, five minutes. Please do it here.