We have an exciting medical research resource for you to try! You may already be familiar with the freely available TRIP database, which can be accessed from any PC without the need for a log in or subscription. TRIP Pro is an enhanced, subscription version of the TRIP database, and is now freely available to Royal Free NHS London Foundation Trust staff. You can access TRIP Pro via any Royal Free networked computer.  If you have any problems accessing Trip, please contact the Medical Library.

If you haven’t used either TRIP Pro, or the freely available version of TRIP before, here’s a quick introduction:

What is Trip?

TRIP (which stands for Translating Research Into Practice) is a clinical search engine covering over 150 health resources, including indexing of content from sources such as  NICE, PubMed, the Cochrane Library and BMJ. Its main purpose is to act as a search engine for the most accurate and up to date clinical evidence. TRIP provides information on guidelines, systematic reviews, controlled trials, regulatory guidance, patient information leaflets, and e-books.

How is TRIP Pro different?

As well as all of the above features of the free version of TRIP, with TRIP Pro you’ll also have access to over 100,000 extra systematic reviews, millions of extra full-text articles, and the ability to search through ongoing clinical trials. You’ll also gain access to a database of medical images and videos.

Some hints and tips:

Sort by clinical area

Refine your search by articles which focus on your specialism – just click ‘Clinical Area’ in the ‘Refine by’ area on the right-hand side of the screen. E.g. a search for “asthma” can be refined by paediatrics, geriatrics, oncology, etc.

PICO Search function

This function allows you to break down a clinical question into four specific parts – Patient, Intervention, Comparison and Outcome. This allows to focus your search even further, and provides you with a useful structure for your clinical research.

Exporting results

To make writing journal articles a little easier, TRIP can automatically export your search results into a reference management service of your choice. Just select the desired search results, download them and upload them onto your chosen reference management service:

If you’d like to find out more about searching TRIP, some handy video guides explaining the basics of using TRIP can be found here.

Happy searching, and please send any questions or feedback to rlibrary@ucl.ac.uk or tweet us @RFHMLibrary

NICE Healthcare Databases Advanced Search (HDAS) is a key resource for finding journal articles. It provides access to key medical and health databases, including Medline, Embase, BNI, CINAHL and PSYCInfo. HDAS is available to Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust staff with an OpenAthens account. If you don’t already have an OpenAthens account you can self-register on the OpenAthens website, using your NHS email address.

If you’re a regular user of HDAS you may have noticed that there have been some changes to the interface.

HDAS has been updated with a completely new look and feel. In order to help you get to grips with the new interface, we’re sharing three top tips for searching HDAS.

Don’t forget the Medical Library offers regular training on searching HDAS and a range of other databases.

1. Use quotation marks for phrase searching

The different databases that you can search through HDAS (see above) handle searches for multiple words or phrases in slightly different ways. Some of the databases will find results containing words appearing separately when processing searches containing multiple words. To make sure your search returns the kind of results you want, it’s best to enclose phrases in quotation marks e.g. “heart disease”.

2. Use truncation to expand your search

If you’re searching for a word which may have a number of potential endings that are relevant to you, make use of the truncation function. For example, if you’re searching for literature on epilepsy, you might want to find records which use the words epilepsy or epileptic. To save yourself time in entering both words, you can use truncation – add an asterisk symbol after the root of the word to find records containing all possible endings e.g. epliep* will find epilepsy or epileptic.

When using truncation in HDAS, be aware that Medline, PSYCInfo and BNI only allow up to 5 characters to appear after the asterisk symbol. For longer words, you’d need to add a number after the asterisk to indicate how many additional characters might appear. For example, entering ‘hypno*’ would find ‘hypnosis’ and ‘hypnotic’ but not hypnotising, because in ‘hypnotising’ there are more than 5 characters after the truncation point. You’d need to enter ‘hypno*6’.

3. Save your search

HDAS will automatically save each line of your search as you create it. You’ll find these lines of search saved in your ‘My Search Strategies’ tab. However, these strategies will only remain saved for a month.

To save a search permanently, simply give the search a name in the ‘Current search strategy’ box and click ‘Save Strategy’ (shown above). Tip: as you can search multiple databases in HDAS it’s a good idea to include the name of the database in your strategy name – that way you’ll know which search belongs to which database. Next time you log into HDAS, you’ll be able to re-load permanent saved searches from the ‘My Search Strategies’ tab (shown below).

This post is for all budding authors out there, whether you’re a clinician thinking about publishing the results of a trial or a case report, or a PhD student looking to publish based on your research.

Millions of articles are submitted to biomedical journals every year. Sadly a high percentage of these articles fail to make it through peer review, resulting in the heartbreak of rejection for their authors.

How can you avoid having this fate befall you? There are a few things you can do to maximise your chances of getting published. One of those things is to think carefully about which journal you submit to, making sure you choose something relevant and appropriate.

Here, to help you plan your submission, are our top 5 tips on choosing a journal…..

1. Start thinking about possible journals BEFORE you start writing

If possible start thinking about potential journals when you’re at the planning stage of your research project. The earlier in your research that you can identify potential journals, the easier it is for you to build any article requirements those journals have in to your project – see tip 5 for more detail.

2. Which journals publish the papers that you’re building on with your own research?

If you’ve been doing research on a particular topic for a while, you’re probably already aware of what the key, influential papers on that topic are. Most importantly, you’ll also know which journals those papers have been published in. Noting which journals the papers that you are referencing in your own research on have been published in can be a quick way to identify a likely candidate for your own article.

3. Search bibliographic databases to identify popular journals for your field

If you’re struggling to identify existing articles on a similar topic to your own, run a quick search on a database such as Medline, Embase or Web of Science. Looking through the results of that search should help you to draw up a list of the main journals publishing in that field.

4. Try using an article matching tool

There are freely available tools which use algorithms to match text against relevant journals. One example is JANE: Journal/Author Name Estimator.  JANE allows you to paste in a paragraph of text, such as an abstract, and then analyses that text, giving you a list of suggested journals which are a good match topic-wise.  Some publishers such as Elsevier and Springer also have similar freely available tools.

5. Check the journal’s guidance for authors

Once you have a potential journal in mind, check the submission guidance for authors for details of required format and article types accepted. Even if you think you have found a journal that is a great match for your article, you still need to make sure that the type of article you want to submit is one that they accept. Most journals make the instructions for authors readily available on their website.