Trip Database Blog

A recent example of a use for related articles was when I was looking for articles on omega-3 fatty acids. I just searched under omega-3 and looked at the returned list. The fourth result was ”Omega-3 fatty acids for bipolar disorder’ which I thought might be interesting, so I hit related articles which returned the following (just showing the top 7):

• Omega-3 fatty acid treatment and T(2) whole brain relaxation times in bipolar disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry 2004
• Omega-3 fatty acids for bipolar disorder Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2008
• Some of our patients have been put on Omacor by a psychiatrist as a mood stabiliser. As this is not listed as an indication in the BNF, I would be grateful for any information about this use of Omacor. TRIP Answers 2005
• Omega-3 fatty acids and mood disorders. American Journal of Psychiatry 2006
• Omega-3 fatty acids: evidence basis for treatment and future research in psychiatry. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 2006
• A meta-analytic review of double-blind, placebo-controlled trials of antidepressant efficacy of omega-3 fatty acids. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 2007
• Cross-national comparisons of seafood consumption and rates of bipolar disorders. American Journal of Psychiatry 2003

So, from having one article on the topic, with the click of a button I have lots – easy!

Sorry, I mentioned it on twitter but didn’t mention it here! Basically, we rolled out some new features earlier this month!

Search history. This is only available if you’re logged in and records each search you make. Most importantly it allows you to undertake complex combination searches. NOTE: This feature is available to the right of the search button.

Search wizard. This is our rather nifty feature that uses a combination of a PICO search and contingency searching to return a small number of results. It works by toggling terms between title only and text anywhere in the article.

Semantic tools. I’ve blogged about this twice (here and here) which is a sign of how much I rate the technology. Basically, it compares documents textually to see if how they compare. Those that are similar – based on word analysis etc are considered related. There are two main ‘outlets’ for the semantic tools:

• Related articles page. This allows you to add text (e.g. free-text question, passage from a book/article etc) and it will find related articles. This has many possible uses (see the first post mentioned above).
• Related articles in the search results. All the semantic analysis has been inspired by my love of the ‘related articles’ feature in PubMed which has been really helpful in finding articles on many many occasions. Now, under each search result, in TRIP, is a ‘Related’ link that shows you semantically similar articles. Why is this helpful? Do a search for colon cancer and this returns many different types of articles (diagnosis, screening, treatment etc). You find an article that you like (e.g. screening family members) you press related and the new results will be closely related and highly likely to be on screening family members for colon cancer.

Oh yes, before Xmas we’re hoping to roll out a new design – a slight upgrade to the current site!

In our previous post I revealed the release of our related articles functionality.

We have now released a bit of code that allows users to embed related TRIP articles into their own pages. For examples see these two examples Noctural Enuresis and Acne Vulgaris. In both cases the related articles are on the right-hand side of the screen, just below the main TRIP logo.

To be clear, you place the code on your site and it will find TRIP content related to your site and place the 3 top related links onto your site – all automatically!

So, if you embed the code, what’s happening? Essentially, the code alerts TRIP to come and look at the page and find related articles from within TRIP’s content. The top three most related articles are then sent back to the page.

If you want to use the code let me know!

TRIP has a CPD (Continuing Professional Development) facility which allows clinicians to reflect on articles that they have looked at via TRIP (for further details click here). These reflections are saved on our system and users can recall these at any time.

We have just rolled out an enhanced export facility that gives the user greater flexibility as to what they export (ie only between 2 dates, to not export certain reflections etc). In addition, the recorded learning is not exported as a PDF file. We have updated our slide show to reflect this (click here).

Since launch our background knowledge boxes have seen heavy usage. The background knowledge boxes appear at the top of the search results and link to textbook style entries (e.g. eMedicine). The idea is that they help give some contextual links to the main research articles.

One idea we’ve got is to allow users to nominate references/links and, in a way, adopt a keyword. This is still not likely to be properly rolled out, although we did receive a suggestion for the osteoporosis entry and have added a link to the WHO FRAX fracture risk assessment tool. On one level this is a small step, but for me it carries a certain significance around future possibilities!

I’ve long admired and found useful the related articles feature on PubMed. When you’re carrying out a search on PubMed and think you’ve exhausted all the references, clicking on ‘Related articles’ often finds gems you would have otherwise missed.

After years of envy, we’ve just rolled out a test version and this can be tried by clicking here. There are multiple ways of using the related article feature and the most obvious is to add text into the text box and press search. Once you’ve carried out a search you’ll see that under each record there is this chunk of text ‘Related: Method A Method B’. These are two different methods of finding articles related to that particular article.

We’re looking for novel ways of using the related articles via the text box and here are a few suggestions:

• Asking free-text questions. For instance typing in “Is calcium useful in preventing falls?” gets pretty good results.
• Writing an article and need to find a reference to support a particular passage – add the passage to the text box and see related references!
• Education needs. One tester has highlighted the usefulness of linking in with PUNs and DENs (educational concepts – Patients Unmet Needs and Doctors Educational Needs) which UK doctors are encouraged to consider. Add the PUN or DEN to the text box and see what happens!

Anyway else got any suggestions?

TRIP has a track record in helping clinicians find answers to their questions. However, it would be naive to think it answers all the questions all the time! So, trying to be helpful, we’ve linked in with the BMJ’s clinical community doc2doc. We’ve just ‘opened’ it in the last few days and the BMJ even produced a press release.

The whole idea behind this collaboration is that if a user of TRIP doesn’t find what they’re after they can use the doc2doc forum to obtain an answer. This could come from the wider clinical community on doc2doc or even the TRIP team, who’ll regularly monitor the site and use our experience to help answer the question.

I’vew just noticed that it’s been nearly three weeks since the last post. I think that’s a sign of how busy things have been! We’re currently working hard on the next update to TRIP. We’ve got a very tight deadline and lots of things happening at once. Also, as some of the upgrades are significant changes they’re requiring significant work.

The main work is around:

• CPD – we’re finally putting the finishing touches on our self-test CPD feature, with over 6,000 education packs.
• TRIP Answers – mainly a redesign, improved search and ‘new research’. This latter feature will automatically highlight new research that may be of interest/update an exisiting question. This is being powered by some semantic technology we’re using.
• Semantic technology features, too complex to state in this brief post, but one for another time. Think ‘Related articles’ in PubMed…

A few tweaks of the CSS on TRIP and it works rather well on the iPhone (and Android phones – thanks @amcunningham). See below for some screen shots. The top image is how the icon looks on the start page of the iPhone, below that is the top of the results page and right at the bottom is the bottom of the results page.

As well as looking great it makes TRIP usable on smartphones which is becoming an increasingly important ‘market’.

NOTE: @amcunningham has commented that the pictures are potentially mis-leading. To be clear, what I’ve described is not an ‘app’ it’s simply our site optimised for web-browsing. The top top image shows a bookmarked TRIP icon that takes you to the homepage.