Adding MeSH to Trip is not going to happen overnight but we’re starting on the journey. One key element we’re focusing on at the moment is ensuring all the documents within Trip are assigned MeSH terms. Many of our documents come from PubMed so these will already have MeSH terms assigned to them, we can simply grab these. However, a large number of documents (synopses, guidelines etc) don’t, so we need to ‘tag’ these documents – and this is what we’ve been doing this week.
SSoTP have informed us that they no longer wish to have a library service from us.
This means that SSoTP staff will not be able to access current ejournal subscriptions purchased by the Health Library. Thus the following titles will be removed from the NHS A-Z journal list for SSoTP staff.
Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) may be the gold standard, but all that glisters is not gold, warns a research fellow at the London School of Economics.1
Alexander Krauss has analysed the 10 most commonly cited RCTs in the medical literature—all with 6500 or more citations—and found that they have potential biases that are frequently unrecognised or unacknowledged by the trials’ originators. To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details.
Maureen Dobbins is the Scientific Director at the National Collaborating Centre for Methods and Tools and last year gave a webinar on the ‘Rapid Review Guidebook’, here it is
recently wrote about the demise of the National Guideline Clearinghouse (NGC). At the time it was fairly bad news as, by them aggregating the guidelines from multiple guideline publishers, it saves us considerable resource. However, every cloud has a silver lining! The NGC was not without challenges
MeSH (full name Medical Subject Headings) is a controlled vocabulary that is widely used in medical information systems. We’re actively exploring using it in Trip as we believe it can significantly improve our search results.
As far as I can tell it will improve them for two main reasons. Firstly, it’ll improve our synonyms function as MeSH is great for that. Secondly, and this is the most exciting aspect for me, is that MeSH is hierarchical. If you do a search for arrhythmia that maps to the MeSH concept of Arrhythmias, Cardiac:
CPFT specialist clinical psychologist Dr Kate Nurser has conducted the first UK research on how storytelling can help the recovery of people who have experienced mental health challenges.