Systematic reviews are an important component of evidence-based medicine. Over the years we have attempted to support our users by finding as many systematic reviews as possible. Recently we have been lucky enough to work with a number of organisations and start-ups who have helped us find more. And, I’m delighted to say that, as of today, we have 564,350 systematic reviews in Trip.

We compared our coverage with a number of other databases, for example PubMed, and we consistently have more. To compare we used title searches (to overcome the differences between searching mechanisms between databases – something that shouldn’t affect title searches) and here are some examples:

Zinc

  • 528 results for Trip
  • 286 results for PubMed (using SR filter)
  • 19 in the Cochrane Library

 Cancer screening

  • 1890 for Trip,
  • 646 for PubMed
  • 19 for Cochrane

One advantage Trip has is that we also include health technology assessments (HTAs). These are often ‘grey’ and therefore don’t appear in most databases (which typically rely on journal publications).

One final thought, having more systematic reviews is something we’re pleased about, but it’s only part of the story. We introduced our guideline scoring system as many guidelines were not evidence-based and we want to help our users understand this fact. The same is true with systematic reviews, some are better than others. So, we’re restarting our work on automatically assessing the quality of systematic reviews. From our previous work (see here) we had a good system, not a great one. With the advent of LLMs we should be able to improve things considerably – watch this space.