Trip Database Blog

When people search on Trip we record – anonymously:

• Time and date
• Search terms used
• Articles viewed

Given Covid-19 is a hot topic I looked at our logs for Covid-19 related queries and found that we had over 500,000 separate search sessions exploring the topic. I’ve had a quick look through the data and found out a number of things that, to me, appear interesting.

Most popular articles

• COVID-19 (Novel Coronavirus) – DynaMed
• Novel coronavirus (COVID-19) guidance for acute care – Ministry of Health, Ontario
• Infection prevention and control for novel coronavirus (COVID-19): interim guidance for acute healthcare settings – Canadian Government
• Interim guidance: public health management of cases and contacts associated with novel coronavirus (COVID-19) in the community – BC Centre for Disease Control
• COVID-19 rapid guideline: managing the long-term effects of COVID-19 – NICE

Timeline

Lots of data relating to the first time something was searched for, for instance:

• 14/01/2020 – the first search for a Covid-19 topic, in this case the search was ‘Wuhan coronavirus’
• 22/01/2020 – personal protection
• 25/02/2020 – vertical transmission
• 02/03/2020 – pcr

‘Timeline’ of a topic

Taking the top seven documents for hydroxychloroquine we charted their popularity over time:

After a very quick burst of interest, attention moved on (probably after people understood the evidence). Imagine if we’d waited 6 months for a systematic review!

Top search terms

• diagnosis
• PPE masks
• screening
• pregnancy
• chloroquine

The above are a few examples of the sort of analysis that could be explored. Another one, not yet explored as it’s difficult to do manually, is to explore topics and see what types of evidence people look at. So, if a topic gets very few clicks does that indicate an evidence gap? If they click mainly on systematic reviews is that a good thing?

Overall, I could do the analysis and report it as a series of blogs. But I feel that there’s probably enough material to make at least one paper. Clearly, it’s not your typical journal article, but there are lots of different article types – so it might fit in somewhere!?

So, I’d appreciate any help thinking this through – for instance:

• What’s the best way of writing this up? In other words, what’s the story behind the date?
• What sort of journal might like this sort of thing? I was thinking of something like the BMJ (yes, ambitious) or Journal of Clinical Epidemiology.
• Any other analyses that might be interesting for people.

If you can help then please send me an email jon.brassey@tripdatabase.com

We are very pleased to announce that we have started the process of introducing OpenAthens as a method of authentication to Trip Pro. We have signed the contracts and started the technical steps with a hope to be testing by the start of February 2022 and a roll-out shortly after. This work has been supported by Health Education England.

Currently, organisational authentication is handled principally by IP. This works remarkably well in most situations but it’s not perfect. By introducing OpenAthens we’ll give organisations a further way of securing access to Trip Pro.

A few people have been in touch highlighting that the way we support advanced Boolean searching has changed.

In the old site you could create a ‘shortcut’ advanced search by typing in the main search box, for example:

If you do this on the new site, you get a different result:

I hope that helps people understand what’s going on and provides an insight into the more complex search opportunities.

A few people have been in touch to ask how to delete their activity in the ‘Recent’ tab. We were never able to give a straightforward/easy answer. Thankfully that has now changed:

As ever it’s great to get feedback as to how we can improve Trip and it’s great to be able to respond!

Trip’s a leading tool to identify evidence from the global evidence-base. Our guideline coverage is one of the stars and today I’m delighted to have added a large number of new guidelines from sources such as the Public Health Agency of Sweden, Alberta Health Services Cancer Guidelines, International Society on Thrombosis and Haemostasis and the European Society for Clinical Nutrition and Metabolism.

In total 436 new guidelines were added from 22 new publishers.

It’s been a lot of work and thank you to those who helped identify these new publishers

I just had a really interesting conversation (with a long-term user), where the deficiencies of our Advanced Search were highlighted! In a way it was not a big surprise, we’ve known we’d need to improve it for some time. So, how to move it forward?

PubMed’s Advanced Search:

Is this the best advanced search out there? Any alternatives we should consider? Any particular problems with PubMed’s approach?

We’re listening

In the recent redesign we removed the evidence pyramids in the results panel, after some feedback we have just reinstated them:

The evidence pyramid concept is explained in this diagram and accompanying text:

In short, these are a simply tool to help convey the potential robustness of the evidence.

As you may be aware Trip has the largest dedicated collection of guidelines and it’s important to us that we continue to develop this valuable resource.

Following on from the new guidelines added in May we have just added a further 6 sites.

NOTE: If you find a guideline not in Trip then please let us know – it’d be great to hear from you.

Just under a month ago we posted a list of four potential improvements to the site (click here for details), alongside an option for user to vote on which they’d like to see. The results so far are as follows:

• Improved search: We have asked a tech/data team to come up with options for improving the sensitivity/specificity of the search. From there we will aim to implement the changes ASAP.
• Search support: We’re really excited to see this do so well. We need to have a planning session to explore what this might look like, this will require our techie and design teams to come together. This is likely to be after we’ve rolled out the improved search.
• Quality scoring: We have already done all of the background work on the guideline quality scoring and we can roll this out when we get developer capacity. After that we have already completed a quality scoring method for systematic reviews, we just need to spend some time verifying that.

All very ambiguous with the dates – as we still have the indexing to finish (see What next? for further details) but while we wait for developer time we’re working hard in the background to bring these to you as quickly as possible.