Trip Database Blog

We started the Trip Database due to our work answering clinical questions. Trip has now been running for over 25 years and we’ve never strayed far from clinical question answering. So, it is really pleasing to say that we’ve just started work on an automated Q&A system. More precisely, users can ask a free-text question and we’ll deliver an answer.

In our internal testing the system worked amazingly well, including on the questions deemed clinically difficult. We were able to expose the references used, so indicating the likely robustness of the answer. Our internal testing was done manually, but all the steps can be automated – now we know the process works. So, we now automate it to generate a very basic testing system. When we get there, we’ll ask users to test it and we go from there.

Coupling clinical Q&A with our hierarchy of evidence is really exciting!

Hundreds of response meant it was more time-consuming to analyse but here are the headlines:

Profession of respondents

• 48% doctors/physicians
• 14% nurse
• 14% librarian/information specialist
• 8% academics
• 16% other

Reasons for using Trip

• 42% literature review
• 30% clinical Q&A
• 15% keeping up to date
• 8% teaching
• 5% research

Any suggestions for new sites to add

The top 5 suggestions being:

• Cochrane
• Cortellis
• Duodecim
• ECRI
• Embase

Suggested improvements

There were very few that got more than one mention:

• Advanced search – already on our ‘to do’ list
• Friendlier presentation – will have to dig deeper to understand that
• Easier storage of searches – possibly can be rolled in to the advanced search work
• Make it all free – alas, not possible
• More full articles – we’re trying our best
• More Public Health content – we can add extra public health journal content, not sure of any other sources

Is there anything else you would like to share about your experience on Trip?

What was nice to see was overwhelmingly positive comments (including my favourite: “Go further, please, you are unique!“), but a few constructive comments and some negatives:

• ChatGPT accepts questions and answers in many languages….
• a DSI (selective dissemination of information) newsletter would be interesting where we ask to stay updated on a topic
• I often don’t get great results from TRIP – I do try! Don’t get on with advanced or pico search functionality, although
• Not great. Also need a better advanced search way better; like Ebsco databases
• Preplexity, elicit and evidence hunt are all great alternatives

We launched our guideline scoring system two months ago; as a reminder this is what it looks like:

Since then we have been very busy added scores for another 50 guideline publishers, including:

• Ministry of Health, Malaysia
• Scandinavian Society of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care
• World Society of Emergency Surgery
• British Society for Sexual Medicine
• European Association for the Study of the Liver
• European Psychiatric Association

We now have scores for almost all the guideline publishers we cover, nearly 300 in total!