Trip Database Blog

As part of Trip’s work with Ariadne Labs (helping to support the roll-out of Trip Pro across Africa) I ran an online webinar on using Trip. One question related to restricting content to African evidence. While we don’t support that, we do have a filter for LMIC (Low and Middle Income Countries) content. It can be found here on the results page:

There are two options:

• Specific – if the document contains any of the filter terms in the title
• Sensitive – if the document contains any of the filter terms anywhere in the document

Below is an example search

It’s a simple system but works well and, pleasingly, the feedback was very positive.

I’ve just uploaded the latest batch of manually curated records, a total of 613 new articles. This number is small, relative to the larger number we automatically grab, but it typically represents the content at the top of the evidence pyramid.

Each month hundreds of sites are visited to explore if they have published any new evidence, if they have this is placed in a spreadsheet before uploading to the site. We record the following bits of data for each record:

• Publication
• Title
• URL
• Year

When we have finished the monthly collection we upload it to our system and that does the rest. New content is typically available by the next day and often much sooner.

Below is a small sample of the records added this month:

1. Opioid Treatments for Chronic Pain (AHRQ)
2. Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia in Adults (Cancer Care Alberta)
3. Systematic review of needs for medical devices for ageing populations (WHO)
4. Addressing Social Determinants of Health and Mitigating Health Disparities Across the Lifespan in Congenital Heart Disease (American Heart Association)
5. Remote monitoring of patients with COVID-19 (KCE – Belgian Health Care Knowledge Centre)
6. Pacritinib (Vonjo) – To treat intermediate or high-risk primary or secondary myelofibrosis in adults with low platelets (FDA)
7. Factors associated with outbreaks of SARS-CoV-2 in nursing homes (HIQA, Ireland)
8. Paediatric Intensive Care Nutrition (James Lind Alliance Priority Setting Partnerships)
9. Gout: diagnosis and management (NICE guideline)
10. Digital smartphone intervention to recognise and manage early warning signs in schizophrenia to prevent relapse: the EMPOWER feasibility cluster RCT (NIHR HTA)
11. Peanut allergy: peanut-avoidant diet and access to adrenaline injector pens (Prescrire)
12. Lipoedema – diagnosis, treatment, and experiences (SBU)
13. Impaired Visual Acuity in Older Adults: Screening (US Preventive Services)
14. Monkeypox: diagnostic testing (UK Health Security Agency)
15. Regulation and financing of prenatal screening and diagnostic examinations for fetal anomalies in selected European countries (Austrian Institute for Health Technology Assessment)

The evidence above is a joy to see and represents a small fraction of the total uploaded each and every month.

Having great content is a key element of Trip’s continued success, that’s why we spend so much resource on it!

In 2014 I wrote this:

“We have a manual system for handling synonyms in our search. This means that if someone searches for IBS we automatically search for irritable bowel syndrome. I’m currently undertaking a review of these synonyms, a long-winded and problematic process – but well worth doing.“

When I say/said a manual list we started the synonyms in Trip by exploring the top used search terms in Trip (I think it was the top 8-10,000 terms) and manually looking through them to see if any might have synonyms. So, when I came across IBS in the list, I would add irritable bowel syndrome. When a user searched on Trip for IBS we would effectively insert the other term, making it IBS OR irritable bowel syndrome. This is a crude but surprisingly effective system and – with the new back-end work finally coming to the end, it’s time to review them again.

This is what I’m looking at:

This might take a while 🙂

Learning lessons from Covid-19, Trip has started actively adding higher-quality content related to Monkeypox. Trip users are actively searching for information and the information ‘landscape’ is changing rapidly. As such, Trip is accelerating it’s content ‘acquisition’.

A search for monkeypox on Trip currently has these results in the top 5:

If you know of any great resources, please let Trip know via monkeypox@tripdatabase.com.