Just over three weeks ago I published Clinical area tagging of documents which highlighted a really useful but fairly neglected part of the site. In short it’s a system that tags documents, by clinical area, as they are added to Trip. There are multiple clinical areas e.g. cardiology, urology, oncology. Users can then search for an item of interest and restrict the search results to a given clinical area.
The motivation for this came, many years ago, from a Professor of Anaesthetics I wanted to demonstrate Trip to. After two weeks of use they reported back, saying that the results were poor. Further investigation reveals their interested in awareness under anaesthesia and they had searched for ‘awareness‘. If you repeat the search yourself (click here) you’ll see very few of the results are related to anaesthesia. However, if you restrict a search of awareness to anaesthesia (click here) the results are really focused and would have impressed the Professor much more!
We’ve recently overhauled and significantly enhanced the tagging process making it even more powerful. Give it a try and let me know how you get on.
Below is a brief screencast to show you how to use it.
Finally, for those interested in the mechanism of action around the tagging of documents it’s fairly simple. We have a list of terms associated with each clinical area. So, words such as cholesterol, hypertension, statins, angina are associated with cardiology. The number of words used per area varies, but in some clinical areas it’s well over one hundred. If any article in Trip contains any of these words in the title it’s tagged with the appropriate area. So, an article on hypertension in children, would be tagged as both cardiology and pediatrics. Due to the nature of the process it can’t be assumed to be perfect, but it is usually very powerful.
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