ResearchBuzz have created a new search function, Just Ask Anybody, based on 75 Ask-An-Expert and Ask-A-Librarian Web sites. It works pretty well, I’m impressed!
Hospitals pick hi-tech clipboard featured on the BBC News website.
It makes no mention of doing bedside searches for information, or allowing clinicians to post their clinical questions – but that’s not to say it can’t handle it. I have a few concerns:
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Infection control – sure you can disinfect it, but clinicians can wash their hands between patients – do they?
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Security (1) – very tempting for thieves
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Security (2) – will it make it easier for people to access files via hacking wi-fi, ‘borrowing’ theclipboard etc.
But overall, it seems an exciting development!
The upgrade is progressing well (all need testing):
1) RSS feed – done
2) Highlighting PDFs – done
3) Improve algorithm – partially done
4) Import of conclusions into main results page – done
5) Snippets – partially done but may be abandonded if the test results don’t improve.
We’re also likely to do one, or more, of the following 3:
1) Improve layout of results page to obtain more results on the results page.
2) Improve the advanced search.
3) Add extra content from PubMed.
With regard the last point we currently include a small amount of material from PubMed, namely, the ‘Big 5’ general medical journals (NEJM, JAMA, Lancet, BMJ and Annals of Internal Medicine) and those outputted from BMJ Updates. However, the people that create BMJ Updates (HIRU @ McMaster) have highlighted just over 100 core journals. My thought is that a search would be carried out of the current content. However, users would have the ability to ‘Add more primary research’ which would then see the extra journals added to the results.
Currently, I’m favouring the top 2, but if anyone has any preferences, let me know via the blog or ‘Contact Us‘ on TRIP.
Sorry! I keep mucking around with the font changes. To start with links were light grey (hard to see). It took me 3 weeks to figure out I could change them, so they went red! Now, I’ve altered them to a purple, not dissimilar to the purple in the logo – seems appropriate!
The clinical cases and images blog has a feature on medical podcasts. Being based in the USA they miss out on the rather nice podcast compiled by Univadis (a pharma portal site).
Nothing to do with TRIP, but seems an innovative and worthwhile campaign. See the TechCrunch blog entry for more details.
We’re currently very busy – so the blog may go quiet for a while! So what are we working on:
1) Gwagle. Gwagle is getting close to its alpha-test launch (1-2 weeks). If you’re interested in taking part let us know via the TRIP Database ‘Contact us‘ form. Gwagle will be open to clinicians (doctors, nurses, pharmacists, PAMs etc) as well as information specialists working in the health sphere.
2) TRIP Updates. The latest round of upgrades are currently being deployed to our test server. The main updates are:
- Improvement to algorithm
- RSS feeds for search results
- Snippets (small summaries of the main document, displayed on the search results page)
- Conclusions. The conclusions of a number of resources will be viewable via the results page. Resources such as NHS CRD, Cochrane, Evidence-Based Medicine, BMJ Updates have conclusions we can grab.
These enhancements should be available within 6-8 weeks.
3) Correcting TRIP errors. Unfortunately, some of the search modification functions (brackets, some boolean and quotation marks) have decided to stop working. So we’re working to get these back!
In January we were searched, as mentioned previously, 365,855 times. But we can now give some more detail as to how people use us:
- Advanced search was used 12,834 times (3.5%)
- Our spelling correction function was used 12,774 times (3.5%)
- Medline articles were viewed 6,988 times (1.9%)
- The Medline search was ‘specialised’ 1,825 times (0.5%)
This suggests that users tend to use the core TRIP content and rarely follow the links to Medline and even less use the specialisation feature. This might be because it isn’t highlighted well (I tend to think not). Alternatively, our inclusion of certain key Medline articles (JAMA, NEJM, Lancet, BMJ, Annals of Internal Medicine and BMJ Updates) which means the ‘best’ material is captured by TRIP. Another possibility is that users simply want TRIP for evaluated, secondary material and if they wanted PubMed, they’d use it.
The large number of mis-spellings shows the worth of investing in our auto-spelling correction function. I’m proud that we were one of the first (if not the first) large clinical database to incorporate this feature (2 years earlier than PubMed).
Our new round of updates is currently underway and one area I’m hoping to improve is the advanced search, it doesn’t perform to the standard I expect. Is the realtively low useage a sign of the greatness of the main search algorithm (so users have no ‘need’ for the advanced search OR a reflection of the poor experience of users attempting to use the current advanced search?
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