Trip Database Blog

Just under a week ago we posted the first list, so time for an update!

There are still lots of searches just for Covid-19 (or variants, such as coronavirus) but there are now lots more variation in frequent searches.  After simple searches for the disease (and removing country specific searches) the top searches look like this:

1. diagnosis
2. chloroquine
3. treatment
4. blood test nasal swab diagnosis
5. ibuprofen
6. pregnancy
7. critical care
8. pediatrics
9. hydroxychloroquine
10. symptoms
11. vaccine
12. interferon
13. patient transport
14. diarrhea
15. nursing

It’s been nearly a week since I posted the first blog about ‘popular’ COVID-19 articles on Trip. I thought it’d be interesting to see if the information sought changes over time and here’s the new ‘top ten’:

1. COVID-19 (Novel Coronavirus). DynaMed Plus. +2 places (previously position 3)
2. Interim guidance: public health management of cases and contacts associated with novel coronavirus (COVID-19) in the community. BC Centre for Disease Control. -1 place
3. Coronavirus (COVID-19): latest information and advice. PHE. -1 place
4. Novel coronavirus (COVID-19) guidance for primary care providers in community setting. Ontario Ministry of Health. +1 place
5. Infection prevention and control for novel coronavirus (COVID-19): interim guidance for acute healthcare settings. Government of Canada -1 place
6. COVID-19 Registered Trials – and analysis. Oxford COVID-19 Evidence Service. New entry
7. Novel coronavirus (COVID-19) guidance for acute care. Ontario Ministry of Health. +1 place
8. Novel Coronavirus 2019 (2019-nCoV). Infectious Diseases Society of America. New entry
9. Interim clinical guidance for patients suspected of/confirmed with COVID-19 in Belgium. Sciensano. New entry
10. COVID-19: infection prevention and control. PHE. -4 places

BTW, linked with the information needs of health professionals, we recently published an analysis of the search terms uses have used, click here to view.

We’ve analysed the search logs of Trip and we’ve had just under 10,000 searches for COVID-19 and related terms. To date, the vast majority of searches (11 of the 12 most popular searches) were simply searches for the actual disease:

• covid
• Coronavirus
• covid-19
• covid 19 OR “novel coronavirus”
• covid 19
• Coronavirus
• covid19
• Coronavirus disease 2019
• Novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV)
• coronavirus or covid-19
• covid-19

A significant number of variants for the same concept!

The non-specificity of these suggests that these were searches to familiarise people with the topic or evidence base and not in response to a specific question.

In tenth position was the first multi-term/complex search ‘coronavirus diagnosis‘. Interestingly, given the disease variants a better search might have been (covid-19 OR “novel coronavirus”) AND diagnosis – as just searching for ‘coronavirus’ brings in other coronavirus results. Searching for ‘novel coronavirus’ makes the search more specific and reduces the results from 292 to 39.

We then got a large number of repeated searches for coronavirus coupled with countries, all from the Middle East or North Africa, I have no idea why!

It’s not till the 42nd most frequent search term that we get to ‘coronavirus treatment’, followed shortly after by chloroquine coronavirus! After that we get to a real ‘long-tail’ set of results:

Interventions

• Ibuprofen
• Interferon
• vaccine
• azithromycin

Other

• critical care
• blood test nasal swab diagnosis
• pediatrics
• patient transport
• pregnancy
• diarrhea
• mortality
• mask
• covid
• covid
• PPE or personal protective equipment
• pneumonia

Over time, I suspect users will start searching for more specific searches and we plan to periodically update this list.

The main lesson for Trip is that it would be great if we can provide better support our users. We can easily create the synonyms coronavirus or covid-19. But can be transpose coronavirus to ‘novel coronavirus’?

In the last few days we’ve significantly increased our coverage of COVID-19 articles and the searching numbers are large. Below is a list of the most frequently looked at articles. It’s biased to the extent that some articles have been in Trip for weeks while others have only gone in in the last day or so. With that in mind, here’s the top ten (most popular first):

1. Interim guidance: public health management of cases and contacts associated with novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) in the community. British Columbia Centre for Disease Control
2. Coronavirus (COVID-19): latest information and advice. Public Health England
3. COVID-19 (Novel Coronavirus). DynaMed Plus
4. Infection prevention and control for novel coronavirus (COVID-19): interim guidance for acute healthcare settings. Government of Canada
5. Novel coronavirus (COVID-19) guidance for primary care providers in community setting. Ontario Ministry of Health
6. COVID-19: infection prevention and control. Public Health England
7. Finding the evidence: Coronavirus. Public Health England
8. Novel coronavirus (COVID-19) guidance for acute care. Ontario Ministry of Health
9. COVID-19: background information. Public Health England
10. COVID-19: guidance for sampling and for diagnostic laboratories. Public Health England

Special mention to two articles from the Oxford COVID-19 Evidence Service (CoI – we’re helping them out with the evidence searching side of things). They have been on the site for around 24 hours and have had significant numbers of clicks, the top one only just outside the top ten!

• COVID-19: NSAIDs in Acute Respiratory Infection
• COVID-19 Registered Trials – and analysis

Given the current situation Trip has been adding as many high-quality documents on Covid-19 that we can find.  This means at least daily uploads of new material. The best search is not “covid-19” (which currently returns 35 results), so we recommend searching for covid-19 or “novel coronavirus” (which returns 143)!

Trip is also involved in the Oxford COVID-19 Evidence Service, helping support a significant number of rapid reviews.

If you see any useful resources then please let us know.

I expect 90% of Trip users have not heard of Zwift and I suspect 99% have never used it. But if you’re part of that 1% then please let me know.

No, I’m not suggesting a ‘Team Trip’ (although that’s quite a nice idea) more I want to bounce a few ideas around with you that relate to Trip developments! Email me jon.brassey@tripdatabase.com

As mentioned previously we are rewriting the vast majority of Trip’s code. This is a great opportunity to revisit Trip’s purpose. I guess it’s something like: Trip is  a search engine which allows users to easily locate the highest-quality evidence for their search.

But, in developing Trip we have often looked at why people search and frequently it is to support clinical question answering by health professionals. This has led us to introduce new features to support this wider aim (such as instant answers, drug information) – these have tended to be little used. Are we wasting our time and should our main focus be on the search?

So, do we focus on making it easier for users to find evidence (and related issues such as exporting records, linking to full-text) or do we balance development to include broader decision support tools such as instance answers, drug information and community support?

As well as the main poll we’re also asking users – if they have time/motivation – to leave their email (in the ‘Other’ box) if they are prepared to help further. This will allow us to ask more open questions relating to Trip’s future.