At the end of 2013 I did a review of the year and now, in early 2015, I thought I’d repeat the exercise for 2014!

First, the stats:

  • We had over 3,600,000 page views.
  • We are up to registered user number 140,000.  However, the standard view is to discount the number by 10-20% for users who no longer use the account and/or spam accounts.  So, we probably have 115-125,000 registered users.
  • The average duration on the site continues to increase 5.08 minutes compared with 4.11 in 2013. This is mirrored in the number of pages per session, increasing from 3.26 to 3.89
  • The bounce rate (people who just visit one page and then leave without engaging) has decreased by 20%

The above represents an ongoing trend which is seeing less unique users but the ‘quality’ is higher in that the users are more engaged and making better use of the site.  It is this engagement that is so satisfying, much more important than some – ego boosting – headline of number of unique visitors (although 3.6 million page views is quite impressive)!

Financial insecurity has been a recurring theme for Trip and I’m really pleased as I think we’re fine for now and this is based on two facts:

  • We’ve secured a couple of grants recently which help in any number of ways.
  • We’ve finally arrived at a business model (freemium) which we will roll out in March (I hope).  I’m optimistic as we’ll be offering a great premium offering and hopefully a number of users and institutions will sign-up.

At the end of 2013 I reported on the disappointment of missing out on an honorary professorship but I was very pleased to be given an honorary fellowship at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM) at Oxford University.  The CEBM runs the wonderful Evidence Live series of conferences and I’ll be involved again in the session ‘EBM into Practice: Future of evidence synthesis: a new paradigm’ which will be alongside Carl Heneghan, Martin Burton and Tom Jefferson.

Other bits and bobs from the year:

  • One of the grants was from the EU Horizon 2020 funding and will see me getting involved in lots of interesting research relating to multi-lingual search as well as a big chunk of machine reading and learning, including an overhaul and enhancement to our rapid review system.
  • My role in Public Health Wales (PHW) seems to be working itself out as I was given the role of lead for knowledge mobilisation (a term I dislike) and I’ve just finished a draft strategy on making PHW more ‘evidence-based’.  I believe my role will then move into delivering on the strategy – which should be a nice challenge.
  • I’ve continued to conduct work in the social networks of articles with the huge support of the wonderful Valdis Krebs.  As a little treat I’ve added two images of further analysis below – happy to share more if anyone is interested!

Other than the above there have been so many other things but many are important to me but probably less so to others.

There is also another, really major, project I’m starting to explore but for various reasons I can’t share now.  But it builds on the answer engine concept but there is the potential for Trip to work with a huge commercial partner.

Finally, a very large thank you to:

  • The users, without you Trip would be nothing!
  • Those users that completed the various surveys.
  • The members of the Trip advisory board for being very generous with your time and your collective knowledge/wisdom.
  • The many incredible people who I have interacted with – I really am lucky. 

2014 has been great and I hope – given the reduced financial stress – 2015 will be even better.