Trip Database Blog

As a new feature (to be rolled out shortly) we’ve produced a video of TRIP. It’s a quick run through the main features of TRIP, so new users can quickly get a feel of what we’re about.

We’ve placed it on YouTube, (as well as embedding it below) as you’ll see the quality is lousy – the resolution is too low. When we launch the video on TRIP it’ll be much higher in quality.

We added AFP to TRIP around ten days ago and it’s already (for me) proved a useful addition.

So what news greeted me ten minutes ago – restricted access (see below)! It’s not as draconian as it could be (only most recent 12 months will be restricted) but it’s a step back….

The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) has announced that beginning in April 2008, it will restrict online access to new issues of its journals, American Family Physician and Family Practice Management, to AAFP members and paid subscribers.

New journal articles will be restricted for a period of 12 months, after which time they will be available on the “public side” of www.aafp.org/afp and www.aafp.org/fpm, where 90% of the journals’ content will continue to reside. Previously, 100% of AFP and FPM content has been available online without a subscription.

TechCrunch highlights SearchMe. I like this! I’m not sure how useful it’d be for clinical search, but I still like it!!!

Around two weeks ago I blogged about TRIP being slow!

Today, I had a very good meeting with our web-team and we’ve located a key problem and highlighted a solution….

When someone does a search of TRIP it doesn’t just do one search it, in effect, does a search for each category (systematic reviews, EB synopses etc) – so that’s 9 searches! Last month we were searched 853,959 times, so the poor processors had to carry out 7,685,631 searches.

So the solution we’re going to work with is something called a rolling cache. This will cache a load of search results on a rolling 30 day basis. So, on day one, someone will search on asthma, we will do all 9 searches on that day (one for systematic reviews, one for EB synopses etc) but then those results will be stored in a cache. The next time someone searches on asthma we’ll take the results, not from carrying out the 9 searches, but from the cache. Bottom line we should see a significant improvement in speed…

Just as well as the rest of the meeting was discussing the 4 major projects that will be rolled out over the next year.

For interest, the NLH Mental Health Specialist Library has a google discussion group (click here).

I never suggest that I’m great at proof reading and the partial screenshot from the homepage proves this beyond doubt! Click on the picture to enlarge!

The Centre for Evidence Based Medicine, Oxford and TRIP are currently working on a joint project looking at the relationship between evidence and experience.

To start with we’re looking for clinicians with experience of treating depression or patients who have ever suffered from depression to undertake a brief online survey.

• Click here to take the survey
• Click here to return to TRIP

In February (a short month), the TRIP Database was searched 853,959 times. This beat our previous record (January 2008) by 131,242 searches. At the end of last year I predicted (optimistically) that we would reach one million searches per month by the end of 2008. If the current trend continues we should reach that easily (see the pretty graph below for trend data stretching back over 18 months).

TRIP is currently working on 4 major new projects, these will all impact on TRIP’s usage. Some will have major effects and some minor ones. One things for sure, I think we’ll need to invest in some new hardware!

For those of you who do not know, TRIP receives no government (or health service) support to run the TRIP Database. Currently, the TRIP Database is subsidised by other information-style contracts we have with a modest number of organisations.

We have ambitious plans for TRIP and we would like to make it self-sustaining. The only clear route is through advertising. We currently have Google ads on the results page and this brings us relatively little; certainly not enough to expand the service! I think the main reasons for this are (probably) the fact that our users are click averse (the advert has to be clicked for us to raise any money) and that the adverts are not targetted too well.

However, we are currently starting to move over to a new advertising system, which will serve adverts from the pharamaceutical industry. This will involve using an advertising agency – so not dealing with the pharma companies directly. Essentially, the pharma company pays the agency to place adverts on sites aimed at clinicians.

The other key advantage to this system is that we are paid, not on clicks, but on the number of time we display the adverts. So simply showing the advert will gain us some income. Last week we were searched nearly 250,000 times (over 40,000 times on one day), so we’re hoping that our income from advertising, while not being spectacular, will give us some extra security and funds to further develop the site.