Trip Database Blog

Our recent survey highlighted that the single most wanted new feature was the ability to save articles. Thankfully this feature is already available.  But, it does reveal that we need to signpost it better!!  So here we go, with this blog post.

Saving is really quite simple, below is a video and below that a simple graphic.  If neither fully explain it then please get in touch.

The National Guideline Clearinghouse (NGC) is a wonderful guideline resource from the USA.  It summaries all American major guidelines (it has over 1,300 guidelines) and adds much value to these.  We link to the NGC records in Trip for ALL our USA guidelines.

Unfortunately, it’s funding is coming to an end and therefore Trip needs to do something to ensure we can still offer USA guidelines – hence the survey.  There are two identical versions of the poll:

• Top one – if you’re a health professional
• Bottom one – if you’re NOT a health professional

Please tick all that apply

Trip allows you to export selected documents using a variety of methods (email, CSV and RIS). RIS is the standard format for referencing software (e.g. Reference Manager).

Alongside each result in Trip is a tick box.  Select the articles of interest and then press the ‘Export’ link (see below):

When you press ‘Export’ a drop-down appears:

For exporting to reference manager style software you select the ‘Export at .RIS’ option and press ‘Go’, the file is then downloaded and you can then import in to your reference management software.

Just under a fortnight ago I asked for help planning the next set of upgrades to the site.  We received an incredible response with 1,436 ‘votes’.  The top ten results being:

1. I wish I could save articles I like
2. I’d like a simple mechanism to show if an article was good or bad (eg thumbs up and thumbs down)
3. I’d like Trip to support me create a rapid review
4. I’d like critical appraisal support
5. I wish there was some statistics support
6. I’d like an Amazon-style ‘People who looked at this article also looked at..
7. I wish I could access Trip Pro
8. I’d like to see comments from others about how they’ve found the article(s)
9. I’d like to see other papers people have clicked on – popular papers!
10. I would like to see more answers (as opposed to links to articles)

I’m incredibly grateful for the feedback. We also had lots of comments which will take further analysis and thank you to the many who left very kind words about Trip 🙂

My thoughts on each point are below:

1. Way ahead of the others in terms of votes and this is the one that made me smile as we have the ability to save items already (see Saving your results with ‘Starring’)!  It made me smile as it shows us, yet again, not to make assumptions. The star system is used in a number of sites, such as Google, but is clearly not ubiquitous – so major fail by us.  Thankfully it should be an easy remedy!
2. Great, I really like that people want to interact with the site!
3. Already in planning
4. More in-depth than 2 (thumbs up or down) and again great to see people want us to support them. This will require some thought!!
5. As with 4, this will require some thought.
6. We have the data, we just need to figure out how to create the interface.  In many ways it’s like SmartSearch, so hopefully it’ll be easy to implement.
7. Sorry!
8. Great, fits in with the interactions mentioned above (thumbs up/down, critical appraisal etc).
9. Pro users can already sort articles by popularity – so we need to improve the interface.
10. We’re working on automating that!