Trip Database Blog

We’ve just upgraded to a new and more powerful server system – lots of extra memory and speed.

As part of the new system we’ve also improved two other things:

• Upgraded the version of our search engine technology to the latest version. This has improved many things including my own bugbear – duplicate terms in the title boosting the result. In the old version if a document had the search term(s) mentioned twice in the title it would get a large boost. It didn’t happen often but it was annoying! But it appears that’s been fixed.
• Improved our indexing of PubMed.  Previously we’d been grabbing all the content from PubMed via eUtilities and we only realised recently that this included all the additional meta-data including things like related articles and cited articles data.  This created false positive results.  Our new indexing will now only grab content from the abstract.  This means results counts are both reduced and more accurate (less noise).

We’ve tested it extensively but if you spot anything strange please let us know.

NOTE: I can see the new server but it might take 24 hours for the internet’s address book to point at the new version. If the ‘Evidence Maps’ link at the top of the page is highlighted yellow, you’re still pointing at the old version!

Currently Trip includes a sub-set of PubMed. This includes all RCTs and systematic reviews and the content of around 500 ‘core’ journals. In total this represents around 10-15% of all the PubMed content. Putting it another way we have around 3-4 million PubMed records out of around 28 million.

But, to be clear not all records are equal.  Some will be to do with veterinary medicine (e.g. Serum amyloid A and plasma fibrinogen concentrations in horses following emergency exploratory celiotomy)  and others might be very specialised technical articles (e.g. Phase-matched virtual coil reconstruction for highly accelerated diffusion echo-planar imaging). So, we’ll be potentially including extra noise. We can mitigate against that – to a point.

In summary, searching all of PubMed is potentially very useful but there may be downsides. So with that in mind what do you think?