Trip Database Blog

Before going free-access in September we’re experimenting with a new search algorithm, which was delivered 2 days ago. We’ve got around 25 volunteers to play with it to see how they think it works. It’s difficult for me to be objective but my initial trials are promising. A few weird results, but hopefully these are small issues relative to the improvements.

It’s made me appreciate the ‘work in progress’ all search systems must have in order to improve. I feel we’re at the start of a very long journey – exciting times.

Been doing some work around google health and yesterday I searched for ‘tonsillitis’ and got the image on the left, this didn’t work in Canada! Just did a search for ‘prostate cancer’ and got the second image – note the refine function. Interestingly, or perhaps disappointingly, it didn’t give the same results with ‘prostatic carcinoma’ – perhaps synonyms will be plugged later.

Although is this google health? Wouldn’t that be stand alone like google finance – something like http://health.google.com?

One of the refine functions is ‘For health-professionals’ which when clicked gives the following search syntax ‘more:for_health_professionals’. Alas, for tonsillitis the first page of results are for patient information sites! For prostate cancer it did slightly better – but not hugely!

Below are the top ten papers reached via the TRIP Database for April 2006.

1) Acute Pain Management (National Health and Medical Research Council)
2) Geriatric Care and Treatment (SBU)
3) National clinical guidelines for stroke 2nd edition (Royal College of Physicians)
4) A review of the effectiveness and appropriateness of peer-delivered health promotion interventions for young people (eppi)
5) Anemia (eMedicine)
6) Antenatal care Routine care for the healthy pregnant woman (RCOG/NICE)
7) Management of chronic pain in adults (NHS Quality Improvement Scotland)
8) COPD (PRODIGY)
9) Contraception (PRODIGY)
10) COPD (NICE)

Microsoft discuss their new QnA service (click here).

Recommendations from HubMed (click here)

EBMsources have evaluated the TRIP Database (click here for evaluation). TRIP did reasonably well, scoring 87/100.

I’ve been working with EBMsources to try and improve their scoring system, a new version is currently being validated.

TRIP lost score for not being bilingual – betraying EBMsources origins – French Canadian, making bilingualism more of an issue. It also losts points for not being free (soon to be fixed) as well as a few other bits and bobs.

USA Today reports on the possible release of Google Health next week.

As part of the preparation to include the big 5 medical journals (NEJM, JAMA, Lancet, BMJ and Annals of Internal Medicine) I’ve been doing some preliminary work. As feared the Lancet still does not allow direct linking to their abstracts on the the Lancet website. I can see no good reason for that – they make you register and login to view them. I think this makes them unique!

So what are the options for inclusion in TRIP? The most obvious is to link to their PubMed records. Hardly ideal. The one advantage is that this could be automated via the PubMed XML tools. But then do I include the other ‘big 5’ via this method or link to the abstracts on their respective sites? It invariably looks better going to the sites, but it is more work….

Further to my post of the 18th April….

I shared my views of adding the big 4 journals (JAMA, NEJM, Lancet, BMJ) with Paul Glasziou from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine. Paul carried out a large evaluation of the TRIP Database in 2005 and is someone I have huge respect for. Paul’s view was that it might be better to add Annals of Internal Medicine as well. The reason for this is that these 5 journals (plus Cochrane who we already have on the site) account for over 50% of the articles seclected as part of the Evidence-Based Medicine journal (which Paul edits).

So I’m getting increasingly drawn to the idea of adding these ‘big 5’, irrespective of the workload. However, I may, to begin with just add articles from 2000.