Trip Database Blog

From a Trip perspective 2021 work was led by continued work on the new site. Trip has grown over the years with much of the code very old and very muddled. It was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain and we made a decision to recode the site in 2019! As part of that we took on a new main developer (Abrar) who was supported by Phil (our long-standing developer).

The new site was released as a beta (test) version in April 2021 and fully released in July. It has proved to be remarkably resilient with hardly any issues. This is amazing given the size and complexity of the site.

With all the work going on in the background, Trip has continued to help users to find great evidence. We’ve had millions of searches over the year supporting care across the globe. We’re continuing to attract new subscribers, both organisational and individual – a great sign for the future.

Covid-19

Covid-19 dominated the headlines and, since Jan 2020 (first search was 14/01/2020 for ‘Wuhan coronavirus’), Trip had over 550,000 specific search sessions on the topic. Supplying higher quality research evidence, Trip’s focus, was as valuable as ever.

Linked to that, one related topic is that I’m starting to try to make sense of the clickstream data (see Covid-19 search trends, is there a paper in this data?). I’ve no idea where that journey will take me (but feel free to help)!

2022

The release of the new site in 2021 was only part of the story. What we released was the front end of the site – the bit users interact with. Since then we have been working solidly on the back end – the bit responsible for grabbing and processing the content that is added to the search index. Again, a hugely complex task but we’re getting there. And, hopefully, that’ll be switched on sometime between March and May (users shouldn’t notice)!

After that we can start to introduce the improvements that I’ve wanted to see for years but have been put off as we recode the site. Early releases will hopefully be the guideline scoring work, the improvement to search sensitivity and specificity and a revamped advanced search.

25th Anniversary of Trip.

2022 also marks the 25th year of Trip’s existence. I have no idea when it was went live on the internet (previously it was an excel spreadsheet) and the Internet Archive doesn’t help. So, that’s a bit of a damp squib. If we get any time to think we may try to do something to commemorate!

Bye Bye to the NHS

On a personal level, at the end of March 2021, I left the National Health Service (after nearly 30 years). My final job being Lead for Knowledge Mobilisation at Public Health Wales. It’s nice to now be able to concentrate more of my time on Trip.

When people search on Trip we record – anonymously:

• Time and date
• Search terms used
• Articles viewed

Given Covid-19 is a hot topic I looked at our logs for Covid-19 related queries and found that we had over 500,000 separate search sessions exploring the topic. I’ve had a quick look through the data and found out a number of things that, to me, appear interesting.

Most popular articles

• COVID-19 (Novel Coronavirus) – DynaMed
• Novel coronavirus (COVID-19) guidance for acute care – Ministry of Health, Ontario
• Infection prevention and control for novel coronavirus (COVID-19): interim guidance for acute healthcare settings – Canadian Government
• Interim guidance: public health management of cases and contacts associated with novel coronavirus (COVID-19) in the community – BC Centre for Disease Control
• COVID-19 rapid guideline: managing the long-term effects of COVID-19 – NICE

Timeline

Lots of data relating to the first time something was searched for, for instance:

• 14/01/2020 – the first search for a Covid-19 topic, in this case the search was ‘Wuhan coronavirus’
• 22/01/2020 – personal protection
• 25/02/2020 – vertical transmission
• 02/03/2020 – pcr

‘Timeline’ of a topic

Taking the top seven documents for hydroxychloroquine we charted their popularity over time:

After a very quick burst of interest, attention moved on (probably after people understood the evidence). Imagine if we’d waited 6 months for a systematic review!

Top search terms

• diagnosis
• PPE masks
• screening
• pregnancy
• chloroquine

The above are a few examples of the sort of analysis that could be explored. Another one, not yet explored as it’s difficult to do manually, is to explore topics and see what types of evidence people look at. So, if a topic gets very few clicks does that indicate an evidence gap? If they click mainly on systematic reviews is that a good thing?

Overall, I could do the analysis and report it as a series of blogs. But I feel that there’s probably enough material to make at least one paper. Clearly, it’s not your typical journal article, but there are lots of different article types – so it might fit in somewhere!?

So, I’d appreciate any help thinking this through – for instance:

• What’s the best way of writing this up? In other words, what’s the story behind the date?
• What sort of journal might like this sort of thing? I was thinking of something like the BMJ (yes, ambitious) or Journal of Clinical Epidemiology.
• Any other analyses that might be interesting for people.

If you can help then please send me an email jon.brassey@tripdatabase.com

We are very pleased to announce that we have started the process of introducing OpenAthens as a method of authentication to Trip Pro. We have signed the contracts and started the technical steps with a hope to be testing by the start of February 2022 and a roll-out shortly after. This work has been supported by Health Education England.

Currently, organisational authentication is handled principally by IP. This works remarkably well in most situations but it’s not perfect. By introducing OpenAthens we’ll give organisations a further way of securing access to Trip Pro.

A few people have been in touch highlighting that the way we support advanced Boolean searching has changed.

In the old site you could create a ‘shortcut’ advanced search by typing in the main search box, for example:

If you do this on the new site, you get a different result:

I hope that helps people understand what’s going on and provides an insight into the more complex search opportunities.

A few people have been in touch to ask how to delete their activity in the ‘Recent’ tab. We were never able to give a straightforward/easy answer. Thankfully that has now changed:

As ever it’s great to get feedback as to how we can improve Trip and it’s great to be able to respond!

Trip’s a leading tool to identify evidence from the global evidence-base. Our guideline coverage is one of the stars and today I’m delighted to have added a large number of new guidelines from sources such as the Public Health Agency of Sweden, Alberta Health Services Cancer Guidelines, International Society on Thrombosis and Haemostasis and the European Society for Clinical Nutrition and Metabolism.

In total 436 new guidelines were added from 22 new publishers.

It’s been a lot of work and thank you to those who helped identify these new publishers

I just had a really interesting conversation (with a long-term user), where the deficiencies of our Advanced Search were highlighted! In a way it was not a big surprise, we’ve known we’d need to improve it for some time. So, how to move it forward?

PubMed’s Advanced Search:

Is this the best advanced search out there? Any alternatives we should consider? Any particular problems with PubMed’s approach?

We’re listening

In the recent redesign we removed the evidence pyramids in the results panel, after some feedback we have just reinstated them:

The evidence pyramid concept is explained in this diagram and accompanying text:

In short, these are a simply tool to help convey the potential robustness of the evidence.

As you may be aware Trip has the largest dedicated collection of guidelines and it’s important to us that we continue to develop this valuable resource.

Following on from the new guidelines added in May we have just added a further 6 sites.

NOTE: If you find a guideline not in Trip then please let us know – it’d be great to hear from you.