For most of us this long winter is really starting to take a
toll… maybe it is time to take Trip and rejuvenate? And since the winter
weather has not totally left yet –why not try a staycation! Lucky for dentists,
the ultimate staycation can come in the form of (taking a) Trip, a “tool for you to find and use
high-quality clinical research evidence”, right from your office or home!
What does T.R.I.P. stand for? Well, currently nothing;
however, it used stand for Turning Research Into Practice. From the initial
conception of Trip, as an Excel spreadsheet, until the current web based form,
the impetus behind Trip has been about helping medical care professionals to
quickly (and easily!) find information for evidence based medicine and/or
evidence based dentistry.
So, what kind of information can you find using Trip?
Searches can pull up information such as secondary evidence (evidence based
synopses, systematic reviews, or guidelines), clinical Q&A, key and
extended primary research, controlled trials, case reports or e-textbooks.
Trip can be used with a simple search, by typing in the
subject you are interested in or you can switch over to the advanced search if
you are looking for information that is a bit more specific or time sensitive.
Trip also uses a synonym function which attempts to find alternate ways of
saying your search term simultaneously (e.g. dental caries and dental
cavities). The synonym function has some similarities to using a MeSH search in
Medline.
More recently, Trip has included a search function where you
can break your research question into PICO concepts (Patient, Intervention,
Comparison, Outcome) and search the database using all (or some) of these
concepts. For a bit more information on PICO, please visit our Evidence Based
Dentistry research guide
Although you may not have time to take a real trip this
spring, we hope we have enticed you to spend a few minutes one day checking out
Trip! We guarantee it will be almost as
fun as a trip to the Bahamas or Cuba!
No comments:
Post a Comment