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Algorithm working again!

Hurrah!

Things are pretty much back to normal with the search algorithm, so apologies for the poor service. For some reason PubMed has been having problems as well. A poor time for searchers.

This ‘scare’ with the algorithm has further emphasised the need to ensure the best search results possible. TRIP still has work to do on this and it is our priority. We’re hoping to get started on a major overhaul of this by the end of the month.

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Top ten search tips for TRIP

I was asked to produce a top ten search tips for a librarian (Beryl) in the Wirral (my birthplace) and was happy to help out. She suggested I share the list, so here goes:

  1. TRIP is a free resource aimed at delivering the highest quality literature to support clinical practice. As such we focus on quality of content not quantity.
  2. When searching using more than one search term tends to get the best results. A search on ‘asthma’ will yield a large number of results while a search on, say, ‘asthma and steroids’ brings back a more focussed set of results.
  3. On the results page you can filter the results based on the type of material you’re after e.g. guidelines, systematic reviews etc.
  4. TRIP also carries out an automatic search of PubMed using the clinical queries interface. TRIP allows these results to be ‘specialised’ to only return results from core journals from numerous specialities e.g. cardiology, oncology, immunology.
  5. The advanced search allows greater flexibility in searching. For instance, you can look for keywords that only appear in the title of a document. You can also combine multiple searches.
  6. My-TRIP allows you to record keywords of interest. Then, when TRIP updates the content (monthly), any new material is e-mailed to the user. Registering with My-TRIP also allows users to comment on documents included in TRIP.
  7. TRIP supports various different ways of enhancing searches. These include the ability to use brackets, phrase searching (by placing phrase in quotation marks), stemming (e.g. ‘cancer*’ searches for any term beginning with ‘cancer’ e.g. cancer, cancerous).
  8. Where documents have conclusions TRIP has attempted to capture them. Where there are conclusions simply click on the blue ‘i’ button. When there is no conclusion this button is ‘grayed out’.
  9. The latest version of TRIP includes snippets (small auto-generated segments of the article on interest) these can significantly improve recall of appropriate documents. These can be turned off if they are too intrusive.
  10. TRIP also searches two other collections of date medical images and patient information. These can be accessed via the links above the search box.

If anyone can think of any other then let me know! For additional search tips you can visit our more comprehensive list by clicking here.

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Quality not quantity

Around 5 years ago TRIP only searched secondary review articles (systematic reviews, guidelines, CATs etc). This was fine, but our analysis found that this meant only around 20%. We decided then that TRIP should seek to answer clinical questions using the ‘highest’ quality research. In other words, if there was no secondary review then primary research or eTextbooks are better than nothing. Since then we’ve embraced this philosophy and we will continue to do so.

So what’s the problem?

In part the problem will be improved with our next planned improvement in the search algorithm. This will weed out much of the ‘noise’ within TRIP results.

However, you will still find poorer quality material (e.g. eTextbooks) mixed in with secondary reviews. I’m not actually sure that’s a problem but another approach might be to create a ‘quality slider’. What’s one of them? Well, it’s a facility that allows users to have a slider that allows them to choose what quality material they want to see. See the quality pyramid below:

A default could be set so that only the top 2 or 3 sections are searched. If an answer is found then fine. However, if not, the user can move the slider down to automatically include the lower down sections of ‘evidence’. This would make the selection of lower quality evidence explicit. An alternative would be to include everything in the main search (as happens now) and allow users to use the slider to exclude certain content.
One to ponder!
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Teething troubles

I thought it was too good to be true – the new upgrade! It has come to our attention that the new upgrade has, somehow, messed up the algorithm. We’re looking into it now and hopefully it’ll get fixed ASAP.

It appears that this only affects the global search i.e. the initial search where all the results are combined. Clicking on a specific category (e.g. systematic reviews) brings the results more ‘into focus’.

Apologies….

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How much does the internet weigh?

Apparently around two ounces (60 grams) or significantly lighter if you use an alternative method. Click here for the full article.

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The new TRIP

Around 11.30 today the new version of TRIP went live. But what’s so different? Lots of new features most designed to help users locate the information they need quickly; these include:

  • Snippets. These are the 2-3 lines of summary text from the returned document. These have been demonstrated to significantly improve the recall of appropriate search results.
  • Conclusions. Where documents have conclusions we have designed our system to ‘grab them’ and allow them to be displayed within TRIP. This has numerous advantages including a significant reduction in bandwidth, very useful if you don’t have the ‘luxury’ of broadband access.
  • Advanced search. This has been redesigned to allow a significant improvement in usability in this function.
  • Comments. We love the BMJ’s ‘rapid responses’ so why not allow TRIP users to share their views with the wider TRIP community?
  • RSS feeds. This feature allows you to ‘save’ a search as an RSS feed. If new material is added that appears in the top 50 search results for the same search, its outputted via RSS.
  • Memory. We’ve doubled the capacity of our servers memory, this should bring about a rapid increase in speed.
  • Redesign. A mixed blessing this one! Basically, we need to increase our income vai Google ads. As it stands not enough people are clicking on the ads so our income from these is not sufficient to pay for costs and fuel our significant development plans. By making the ads more prominent, the theory is, that more people will click on them….

I’m pretty chuffed, I hope you are too!

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In around 12 hours….

…the new version of TRIP will start to be deployed. The whole deployment process will take approximately 2 hours. So by lunchtime (British Summer Time) it should be live.

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PMID.US

I was sure I’d blogged this, but I can’t find it – so here goes!

PubMed URLs tend to be really long. The typical URL can be http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=17540531

Using this site http://pmid.us allows you to simply add the PMID to the end of the URL e.g. http://pmid.us/17540531

If you click on the last URL you’ll get taken to an article that features TRIP. In this Belgium paper clinicians searched 4 databases (one of which was TRIP) and the authors found very favourable results. I’ve ordered the full-text and will report more when it arrives.

Two other mentions of TRIP recently:

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Joy Division Oven Gloves

A new feature – inappropriate titles for blog posts!

I was going to call this post ‘stuff’ but felt that was pretty dismal/boring.

Anyway, onto the post. Three things to report:

1) Today’s Google blog linked to something called a binary clock. I was intrigued and visited the Think Geek online store and discovered what it was (click here). I want one!

2) I came across this wonderful looking “HEALTH 2.0: USER-GENERATED HEALTHCARE“. I’d love to go but not sure I can justify the time and costs for a single day…

3) The next upgrade for TRIP is taking shape. Yes, we’re still waiting to release the latest upgrade (hopefully next week – I’ve heard that before) but we like to think ahead. The main features will be linked in with the gwagle experiment (see previous post). The main planned features will be user-added content, enhanced My-TRIP, content tagging (with associated tag clouds). We may even add a scoring mechanism whereby users can give a score (based on something nebulous such as ‘clinical usefulness’. It may not sound much but it will represent a significant move in TRIP’s development.

As for the title of the blog post, see this YouTube clip. I was at that concert and the clip doesn’t do the song justice!

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