Boo-hiss!
It appears TRIP has been mis-behaving over the weekend and the error has spilt over into today! We’ve got our techies looking into it and we hope to have normal service resumed surely.
We’re sorry for any inconvenience caused!
I was delighted to receive an e-mail from Hazim at Update Software highlighting their rather lovely new feature on the National Research Register. The NRR is:
“…a database of ongoing and recently completed research projects funded by, or of interest to, the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS).”
In a nutshell it allows you to search for completed or ongoing research in a particular topic. The results can then be added to a map of the UK (up to a maximum of 100 results). Below is a picture of the 76 ongoing, single-centre research projects, looking at ovarian cancer.
TRIP has recently produced a map which highlights active contacts from around the world (click here). However, that only tells part of the geographic ‘reach’ of TRIP as these are people who’ve actively contacted us. We’ve recently added the Google Analytics code to the TRIP site and these show vists by city. Below you will see a world map with lots of circles. These represent where searches have come from. The results below are for Sunday and Monday this week.
The TRIP Evidence Reviews have been available via TRIP for a week or so and are already proving popular (they’ve been viewes a total of 264 times). There are currently 47 reviews and we’ll probably stop developing them in the near future, catch our breath, and see what happens.
Alongside the reviews we’re developing a CPD component, which is looking interesting!
Yahoo Pipes have been around for a while now. Unfortuantely, I’ve not had the time or inclination to dig around and see what they can do. I’ve now started using them and think they are potentially very powerful. I’m sure, at present, I’m using them crudely. In fact, I’ve so far, simply merged two separate RSS feeds – but it’s a start.
Take this old (2004) ATTRACT answer on exercise and depression. If you view that you’ll see that it has a warning “NOTE: The following question is over two years old. We do not routinely update our answers. Therefore, significant new research may now be available.”
I’ve always wondered about auto-updating of answered. Therefore, I created two separate searches in PubMed (with exercise and depression both as [majr] mesh headings), one for RCTs and one for systematic reviews (via clinical queries) and restricted the date to those articles published after the ATTRACT answer. I then exported the results as an RSS feed and joined them together in Yahoo Pipes. You can see the results here.
If this output was then tagged to the bottom of all appropriate Q&A answers they would, in effect, auto-update.
TRIP has been involved in medical and nursing education for a long time. Those with a long memory will remember our Virtual Learning Centre. Various pieces of work, married with our interests, has led us to a rather nice position. We’re currently working on a significant new area devoted to continuing professional development (CPD). We’re currently working through a number of formats and hope to have something for public consumption in the near future.
Exciting time!
I’ve recently seen a batch of new sites which have caught my attention:
- Video Lectures. An online collection of video lectures.
- MEDgle. For all the hypochondriacs
- MeshPubMed and GoPubMed. New interfaces for PubMed!
- ePosters. Share your posters with the scientific world.
David Rothman writes one of the best medical blogs, from an library/information perspective, that I know (click here). Due to his position as a forward-thinking type(!) I sent him the URL to the development version of the new TRIP (minus the comments section). Here are his, flattering, comments (click here).
The TRIP Evidence Reviews are going very well and we’re now approaching 40. I’m not sure when we’ll stop producing them, news ones I mean. My main concern is that, once produced, we have enough resource to update them. Some will need updating every 3-4 months while others will probably only need updating every 6-9 months. We have now added the first batch to TRIP and these tend to come at the top of the search results.
We are very pleased to announce the release of our new ‘product’ called TRIP Evidence Reviews. These are a series of reviews in specific topic areas. The reviews consist, principally, of a collection of links to recent research and guidance in an area. We see these as an educational tool, providing an easy method of updating oneself on new research and thinking in a particular topic area.
For more information see our TRIP Evidence Reviews blog.
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