It’s been nearly a month since my last post, which reflects how busy we are at the moment. The main effort is actually around reviews and combining articles to help answer questions.  This is taking two separate routes, but the potential overlap is clear.

The first route is a review wizard. This would be a step-by-step way of searching Trip followed by a way of capturing all the articles that are of interest and allowing the user to collate these in a ‘beautiful’ format.  People use Trip to review topics all the time.  So, if we can help that process it’s got to be a good thing.

The second route is altogether more ambitious, the near instantaneous meta-analysis. I’m working with a few people to explore a technique I’ve discovered that will allow for near systematic review quality results within ten minutes.  Sounds ambitious?  This has the potential to be massive, turning the productive of high-quality evidence on it’s head.  Currently, it take 1,000 hours, two years and between £20-100,000 to do a systematic review.  Surely, taking ten minutes and little cost and you’ve got something close to a systematic review would be a wonderful breakthrough?  So, I’m aiming high with this one.  It may well come to nothing, but if you don’t try you’ve got no chance.  Also, if I fail I’ll post my failing(s) on the blog and elsewhere and hopefully people can learn from my mistakes and push it through.  I shouldn’t be negative as I’m really optimistic on this one