Trip Database Blog

Trip is mentioned thousands of times in articles in Google Scholar (click here) and in the last year over 300 times (click here).  Most of these are systematic reviews and I found two new articles today, these were:

• Sorafenib-based combination as a first line treatment for advanced hepatocellular carcinoma: A systematic review of the literature
• Trauma center performance evaluation based on costs: A systematic review of cohort studies

Needless to say Trip was not alone and other databases mentioned in these SRs were:

 PubMed
 Medline
 Cochrane Library
 Google Scholar
 EMBASE
 Web of Science
 CINAHL
 ProQuest

 What’s different about Trip? Size, only one paid employee (me and one day per week)!

Trip aggregates some wonderful content.  The main route for people finding this evidence is via search or by registering with Trip and indicating what topic areas they’re interested (in which case we email the user with the latest research that matches their interests).

Towards Christmas I started to experiment with using Twitter as a dissemination route.  Basically, I created two topic areas (Primary care and Cancer) and starting tweeting simply the title of the article and the URL of relevant articles that were recently added to Trip.  The Trip techie (Phil) suggested I use some tracking to see if people are actually clicking on the articles and so I started using a site called Bitly which has been brilliant.  It basically showed that people were clicking in quite large numbers on the articles I had tweeted. So, 5 days ago I started three more topic areas (respiratory, child health and CVD).  So, the results:

• Primary care – 557 followers
• Cancer – 155 followers
• CVD – 38 followers
• Respiratory – 169 followers
• Child Health – 129 followers

As of writing this there have been 2,050 clicks, see image below (click to enlarge)

 In addition we can track which articles have been clicked on the most and some have been spectacular, here are the top 5:

1. Diagnosing pneumonia in patients with acute cough: clinical judgment compared to chest radiography Eur Respir J – 128 clicks
2. Prophylactic antibiotic therapy for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) Cochrane – 62 clicks
3. NSAIDs and cardiovascular safety: the truth makes my heart hurt Tools for Practice – 42 clicks
4. Sulphonylureas and risk of cardiovascular disease: systematic review and meta-analysis Diabet Med. – 41 clicks
5. Once or twice daily versus three times daily amoxicillin with or without clavulanate for the treatment of acute otitis media Cochrane – 38 clicks

 The above figures have far exceeded my fairly modest expectations. 

The five topic areas are the limit of what I can realistically do manually, but if we find some resource we could automate the whole system.  So, we could create many more topic areas (e.g. dermatology, women’s health, allergy, neurology) and even individual conditions (e.g. depression, diabetes, myocardial infarction).

In summary – an exciting innovation!