Trip Database Blog

Trip prides itself on the comprehensive coverage of clinical guidelines; we’re not aware of any resource that comes close in this regard. Given the importance we have spent considerable resource trying to improve it further. One aspect has been our guideline grading project, which we hope to instigate sometime in the next 3-4 months.

More immediately, we are delighted to announce the first output from our project to mine PubMed for clinical guidelines. Up until this weekend all our guidelines were found via guideline repositories, professional website associations etc. This is great, but we’re aware that, for a number of reasons, this misses many guidelines. So, we have started a project to locate guidelines in PubMed and the first results are now available. We have focussed on national guidelines and have extracted guidelines from Japan, Poland, Brazil, France, Germany, Spain, Saudi Arabia Italy and many others.

Due to this work we have added just under 1,000 new guidelines with more to follow over the next few months.

We’ve had a fair bit of feedback on the new site so I thought I’d share it and respond to a few comments. And, as means of an update, we’re working on a ‘snagging’ list of things that need fixing. With a good wind, we’ll move the new site over by the end of May.

The vast majority of users found it easy or very easy to use and a similar number felt confident in using the new system although a few people fed back that they’ll need a bit of time to understand all the changes (BTW this key might help).

When we asked specifically what they liked, this was the sort of feedback:

• Colours
• Shift to the left-hand side of the ‘filter by evidence type’ – nice to see as it was a major worry for me!

Some specific comments being:

“Pretty much all of it. Particularly the quality rating for the primary studies.”
“Beautiful and simple“

When asked what they disliked:

• ‘Nothing’ was, thankfully, a common response
• Access to certain features (eg Latest and Greatest, LibKey) – these we’re dealing with in our ‘snagging list’
• Evidence maps – this is not a feature we’re going to retain for now. It served a purpose, but it’s out of date, things have moved on and I’d want to reinstate it if we had the resource to do it properly!
• Evidence pyramids – I feel your pain, it was something we gave up as part of the wider redesign ‘look and feel’

It’s not too late to give feedback yourself, please use this form.

And, finally, an important issue is that the new site has not crashed once 🙂