Trip Database Blog

Interesting interview with one of the people responsible for Microsoft’s QnA service click here.

We get a large number of questions on individual drugs. Unfortunately, most of the robust resources ‘hide behind’ a firewall and require an expensive subscription to obtain the information. It’s a bit like the Cochrane situation (see previous post) in that (I imagine) the taxpayers have paid for the initial research and development and then have to pay for re-accessing the same information.

I accept that many of these resources require significant input regarding appraising, searching, editing etc. So what’s the solution, perhaps via another great resource highlighted on Ben’s blog. This time it’s an open-access, wiki-based, drug resource called PubDrug. It again highlights what can be done with decent tools (wiki) and a bunch of skilled and enthusiastic individuals. Currently, it has 7 monographs. I hope this expands rapidly.

Ben has introduced me to another new blog, this time for Andrew McAfee. I’ve been discussing Gwagle with Ben for a while now and Andrew McAfee (Associate Professor at Harvard Business School) appears to be doing some very important analysis and thinking. He devised the SLATES pneumonic, which has been handily re-written (so I can understand it) by another blog:

Search: Find what you need, enhanced by emergent description (see tags, below)

Links: More to the point, link relationships or link ranking algorithms

Authoring: Ease of content creation – spare me the angle brackets, make it bone simple

Tags: What do my colleagues call this? I bet it works better than what the IT department calls it

Extensions: If you thought X was [good interesting important useful], you might, by extension find Y similarly so

Signals: tell me something has changed

The purpose of SLATES is “it helps expose how platforms and channels can be brought closer and made more effective in ways that enhance productivity and effectiveness. Yes, we’ve seen most of these elements before. It is in the ease of recombination that they change how things work.”

For those of you with enough willpower to have read this blog for any length of time will realise that, at the start of each month, I tend to give the search stats for the previous month. I imagine I’ll stop when the stats stop going up! But, for February (a short month) we were searched 433,260 times (up from January’s 365,855) – see graph below.

At long last we’ve got a half-decent web-analysis package attached. From that we can also see, in February, we had over 3 million page views. No wonder our web-company is moaning about our band width usage!

An interesting story on the Read/WriteWeb blog and an interesting product. I’ll have to look through the site to see if there are any features that might improve TRIP!

As an owner of a Nintendo Wii (for the children, of course….) I like to hear stories of the health benefits. This was a nice story!

ResearchBuzz have created a new search function, Just Ask Anybody, based on 75 Ask-An-Expert and Ask-A-Librarian Web sites. It works pretty well, I’m impressed!

1. Infection control – sure you can disinfect it, but clinicians can wash their hands between patients – do they?
2. Security (1) – very tempting for thieves
3. Security (2) – will it make it easier for people to access files via hacking wi-fi, ‘borrowing’ theclipboard etc.

But overall, it seems an exciting development!

The upgrade is progressing well (all need testing):

1) RSS feed – done
2) Highlighting PDFs – done
3) Improve algorithm – partially done
4) Import of conclusions into main results page – done
5) Snippets – partially done but may be abandonded if the test results don’t improve.

We’re also likely to do one, or more, of the following 3:

1) Improve layout of results page to obtain more results on the results page.
2) Improve the advanced search.
3) Add extra content from PubMed.

With regard the last point we currently include a small amount of material from PubMed, namely, the ‘Big 5’ general medical journals (NEJM, JAMA, Lancet, BMJ and Annals of Internal Medicine) and those outputted from BMJ Updates. However, the people that create BMJ Updates (HIRU @ McMaster) have highlighted just over 100 core journals. My thought is that a search would be carried out of the current content. However, users would have the ability to ‘Add more primary research’ which would then see the extra journals added to the results.

Currently, I’m favouring the top 2, but if anyone has any preferences, let me know via the blog or ‘Contact Us‘ on TRIP.