Trip Database Blog

Below are the top ten papers reached via the TRIP Database for April 2006.

1) Acute Pain Management (National Health and Medical Research Council)
2) Geriatric Care and Treatment (SBU)
3) National clinical guidelines for stroke 2nd edition (Royal College of Physicians)
4) A review of the effectiveness and appropriateness of peer-delivered health promotion interventions for young people (eppi)
5) Anemia (eMedicine)
6) Antenatal care Routine care for the healthy pregnant woman (RCOG/NICE)
7) Management of chronic pain in adults (NHS Quality Improvement Scotland)
8) COPD (PRODIGY)
9) Contraception (PRODIGY)
10) COPD (NICE)

Microsoft discuss their new QnA service (click here).

Recommendations from HubMed (click here)

EBMsources have evaluated the TRIP Database (click here for evaluation). TRIP did reasonably well, scoring 87/100.

I’ve been working with EBMsources to try and improve their scoring system, a new version is currently being validated.

TRIP lost score for not being bilingual – betraying EBMsources origins – French Canadian, making bilingualism more of an issue. It also losts points for not being free (soon to be fixed) as well as a few other bits and bobs.

USA Today reports on the possible release of Google Health next week.

As part of the preparation to include the big 5 medical journals (NEJM, JAMA, Lancet, BMJ and Annals of Internal Medicine) I’ve been doing some preliminary work. As feared the Lancet still does not allow direct linking to their abstracts on the the Lancet website. I can see no good reason for that – they make you register and login to view them. I think this makes them unique!

So what are the options for inclusion in TRIP? The most obvious is to link to their PubMed records. Hardly ideal. The one advantage is that this could be automated via the PubMed XML tools. But then do I include the other ‘big 5’ via this method or link to the abstracts on their respective sites? It invariably looks better going to the sites, but it is more work….

Further to my post of the 18th April….

I shared my views of adding the big 4 journals (JAMA, NEJM, Lancet, BMJ) with Paul Glasziou from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine. Paul carried out a large evaluation of the TRIP Database in 2005 and is someone I have huge respect for. Paul’s view was that it might be better to add Annals of Internal Medicine as well. The reason for this is that these 5 journals (plus Cochrane who we already have on the site) account for over 50% of the articles seclected as part of the Evidence-Based Medicine journal (which Paul edits).

So I’m getting increasingly drawn to the idea of adding these ‘big 5’, irrespective of the workload. However, I may, to begin with just add articles from 2000.

I came across a nice site, Visual Thesaurus, which is unfortunately not free-access! But offers a few trial goes. It reminded me of the TouchGraph feature in HubMed. I’m not sure how useful these things are, but they interest me.

I’m still keen on introducing a relationship function on the TRIP Database. I see it working like Amazon’s ‘People who bought this….’. So it’s be something like ‘People who viewed this article also looked at these’. However, as with the visualisation features above I’m not sure how useful it’d be!

Below are the top ten papers reached via the TRIP Database for March 2006.

1) Abdominal ultrasound in the diagnosis of childhood appendicitis (BestBets)
2) Geriatric Care and Treatment (SBU)
3) Osteoporosis (Patient UK)
4) Routine antenatal care for healthy pregnant women (NICE/RCOG)
5) If a patient with osteoporosis is unable to take calcium supplements, are bisphosphonates as effective as when a patient is able to take calcium supplements? (NLH Q&A Service)
6) Day Case Laproscopic Cholecystectomy (British Association of Day Surgery)
7) Evaluation of the patient with sore throat, earache, and sinusitis: an evidence based approach (DARE)
8) Burkitt Lymphoma (eMedicine)
9) Acute Pain Management (National Health and Medical Research Council)
10) Effective Medical Treatment of Opiate Addiction (NIH Consensus Statement)

I was pleased to see a NLH Q&A Service answer in the top ten – shows other people are, at least, interested in them. In March over 3,000 visits to NLH Q&A Service answers were ‘facilitated’ by the TRIP Database.