Web site of the month: TRIP

Here at the Library Service we have been fans of the TRIP (Turning Research Into Practice) database for many years.

TRIP is a UK clinical search engine designed to allow clinicians to find the best evidence to answer their clinical questions.

TRIP has an easy to use simple search, but also offers two other ways to search in a more sophisticated way.

The advanced search option is very similar to the same feature in Google and allows you to combine search terms in different ways to find the information you want (including phrase searching, limiting by year and excluding words).

The PICO (Patient/Population Intervention Comparison Outcome) interface allows you easily break your search down into its most important elements which is really useful when answering a clinical question.

TRIP's PICO search 

Once you have found your results TRIP offers different filters so you can further narrow down your results by type of evidence (systematic reviews, guidelines, primary research etc).

As well as searching for evidence, TRIP searches other sorts of content which is displayed in your results including images, videos, education/CPD material, information for patients and news items. Each is displayed on its own tab, again allowing easy filtering of your results.

TRIP is free to use and doesn't require any passwords, but there are some  advantages to logging in to it (which you can do via Facebook or Twitter, as well as setting up your own account manually).

If you add Northamptonshire Healthcare or Northampton General Hospital as your organisation when you set up your account, you will be able to click through any links to journal articles and see if you can access them via the Library Service's electronic holdings (you will still need to log in with your Open Athens account to access the actual article).

Once you have signed in, TRIP will create a timeline of your activity on the site so you can easily revisit any searches you have previously undertaken. You can even export your timeline as a .PDF file to use it as evidence of CPD.

TRIP is a great resource, easy to use, accurate, fast and much more flexible than the NICE Evidence Services site, offering more sophisticated searching and better personalisation.

You can find TRIP at www.tripdatabase.com