Centre de Collaboration Nationale des Méthodes et Outils

The short answer is yes, TRIP has been evaluated. I have pulled the information below, from the TRIP site.

http://www.tripdatabase.com/index.html

"The evolution of the TRIP Database has been guided by the desire to answer real clinical questions using the principles of evidence based medicine. TRIP Database Ltd’s involvement in clinical question answering (for more information see TRIP Knowledge Services) has shown the type of material that is useful in answering genuine questions health professionals have. More recently the site has been externally evaluated by a team from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (www.cebm.net) led by Professor Paul Glasziou. The findings of this report have been very useful in this latest site upgrade."

I hope that helps.

Ann

I have often had the experience that once I have reviewed a systematic review and I am interested in the intervention that has been evaluated; I have to go back to the literature to find the article that describes the actual program. It feels like a major barrier – is there a short cut to getting the original article that I don’t know about?

Different forms of research are useful at various stages of research use. When deciding about an overall intervention for public health, a systematic review is best for giving you a quick answer. It is great that we currently have the Cochrane Library free to Canadians (at least until the end of Dec 2009); and all the Cochrane reviews relevant to public health practice in Canada are easy to search through http://www.health.evidence.ca

However, once the decision is made, you can use the references of successful interventions cited in the review, to get more details about the actual intervention. Even then, you may have to contact the author to really find out the intervention protocol. Scientifc journals want more info about methods and less about the intervention. However, you will find that authors are usually more than happy to send you the protocol.

Donna

Another resource that you can use to access full text articles is pubget. You just need the full citation and pubget will search for the article. This is helpful when you get to the end of a systematic review and you want to see the original article that describes the intervention or prevention strategy of interest.

pubget is one of the fastest ways to find articles. If the article is available free you will be given access to the full text. If it is not available free you will be given the option to purchase it. The downside is that sometimes you may have to pay for the article – the upside is you have a resource that, in minutes, can find you the article you are looking for and it may be free!

Here’s the address for http://pubget.com

Also note that if pubget does not give you the full text, it will search for other similar articles and provide you with their full text. Sometimes this leads to more recent studies or reviews than the one you are working with. This feature is activated as "see related papers" under the "more" button associated with each citation.


Ann

There are many list serves, networks etc. that support public health but I’m not sure the question I have should be answered solely based on practice –I think I need to look at some evidence based on research. Like most people in public health, I don’t have a lot of time to search – there are probably many databases available online but my goal is use minimum time for maximum results. Can you tell me what kind of databases are out there that you think would be useful? Is there a list of “top 5” that I should bookmark? I have been reading the earlier discussion so I have already bookmarked “TRIP”.

thx

Here are my top 5 for public health questions:


1. Health-Evidence.ca (no need to also go to Cochrane because if they are relevant to pubic health, they are already in Health-Evidence) Health-Evidence

2. Pubmed – using Clinical Queries. Pubmed- Clinical Queries Clinical Queries uses some “behind the scenes” search strategies to help you find the best evidence for a question. It has been tested against hand searching the same journal set.

3. Pubmed without Clinical Queries Pubmed You may end up with too many hits, but you can use limits (language, human, dates, methods) to narrow down the number

4. NICE Guidelines (narrowed by topic to public health) NICE Guidelines
Based on high quality systematic reviews; several new topics being added every year

5. TRIP TRIP

Searches across evidence-based resources (synopses, guidelines and systematic reviews); originally clinically based but expanding in community prevention inclusion.

Another useful resource for searching high quality public health literature is Public Health +.

Public Health + is a searchable online archive of methodologically strong articles selected from > 140 journals. The articles are rated for relevance to public health and newsworthiness. The abstracts of primary studies and systematic reviews are available to browse or search. Public Health + is updated weekly and it is a good place to search after you have searched health-evidence.ca and you want to see if anything very recent is available that is relevant to your question that has not yet been added to health-evidence.ca OR to identify any high quality and current primary studies related to your situation.

The number of articles in Public Health + is still quite small but it is growing each week.

You can sign up to receive a weekly e-mail updates of the new articles added to Public Health +. The e-mails are usually quite brief and receiving them is a great strategy to help you scan the new high-quality literature relevant to public health that is available.

I should mention that Public Health + is in English only. Health Evidence which was mentioned earlier is available in both English and French.