When should you use Trip search, and when should you use AskTrip?

Trip offers two ways to explore clinical evidence: search for relevant documents, or ask a question and receive a referenced answer. Which should you choose?

A practical example helps illustrate what each offers:

Is oral or IV iron the best practice for treating iron deficiency in individuals over 65 years old?

With Trip search, a simple starting point is iron deficiency AND elderly.

This opens up the wider topic. The results include research on iron deficiency in geriatric patients, studies of investigation and outcomes, and the British Society of Gastroenterology guideline on managing iron deficiency anaemia in adults.

That breadth is useful when you want to understand what evidence is available, find a particular guideline, or choose which studies to read. You can filter by evidence type, such as systematic reviews or guidelines, and use the year range to focus your search.

It is also a starting point rather than a finished search strategy. The query does not specify oral or intravenous treatment, so not every result will address that comparison. You can refine the terms as you discover which aspects of the topic matter to your question.

AskTrip starts with the question you want answered. Rather than translating it into search terms, you can ask it in full.

In this AskTrip example, the answer presents oral iron as the usual starting option and identifies circumstances in which IV iron may be preferred, including intolerance, inadequate response or a need for rapid correction.

The answer then expands on the evidence, safety, monitoring and research gaps, with references to explore. It also highlights an important limitation: much of the available research comes from specific settings, such as surgery, and may not directly answer questions about older adults living in the community.

This makes AskTrip useful when you have a focused question and want an initial synthesis to orient your reading. The references allow you to examine the sources behind it; the summary still needs to be assessed in the context of the patient and the applicability of the evidence.

You can then take the question further. The “Explore further” feature lets you ask for more detail or challenge the answer. Suggested follow-ups in this example include when to switch from oral to IV iron and what is known about longer-term health outcomes.

You can also move to Trip search to explore a guideline in full, look for additional studies or widen your reading beyond the treatment comparison.

Equally, you might begin with search, identify an issue that needs clarification, and take that question to AskTrip.

Use Trip search when your priority is finding and selecting the documents you want to examine. Use AskTrip when your priority is a referenced synthesis of a specific question, with the option to explore it further.

Try the two links above with the same clinical problem and see how each supports a different part of finding and understanding the evidence.