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Liberating the literature

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jrbtrip

Currently, on the TRIP Database you do a search and the results are returned hierarchically. Therefore, you need an additional click to view results in, say, ‘Evidence-based synopses’. Perhaps a better way would be to return a page of results straight-away and then if people want to select only a single category – let them do that. Some thought needed but perhaps merge all the results into one and devise a weighting mechanism to ensure the ‘better’ material is at the top. But what might the attributes of ‘better’ be? Type of publication, year of publication….

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One of my regular blogs is Dean Giustini’s Google Scholar Blog. It was seeing Dean’s editorial in the BMJ (http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/331/7531/1487) that got me thinking about where the TRIP Database might fit in. Behind a subscription login/firewall is no place. As one of my colleagues said ‘no-one pays for search’. Not technically true as we have reasonable subscription levels – but I get the point. Do we continue to stay in our niche getting searched 50,000 times per month? Ordo we change to being free-access? The subscription allowed us to grow significantly in the 2-3 years we’ve been charging. However, our latest upgrade (Dec 2005) has increased my frustration of it ‘hiding’ behind a firewall. Biased though I may be – it’s just too good to hide….

So thank you to Dean for getting me thinking.

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More stats to celebrate the new blog! The top search terms used in TRIP are:

  1. asthma
  2. diabetes
  3. hypertension
  4. cancer
  5. osteoporosis
  6. otitis media
  7. stroke

These terms are so broad and return lots of results – arguably too many to sift through. It makes the decision to add a prominent ‘refine search’ box appear sensible.

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Mis-spelling. One of the new features on the TRIP Database was not a mis-spelling feature (we’ve had one for years) but a counter to accurately measure how often people use it. So we feel it’s a pretty good proxy for number of searches mis-spelt. For the first 3 weeks of February nearly 5% of all searches were mis-spelt.

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