Dear All,
Thanks to those who provide feedback on the current Cochrane library. Below
are 16 suggestions I have received.
These are due in on the 30th of April.
Therefore by *Friday* could I ask you for:
1. A vote on your #1 suggestion (just send me the number or the text of
your favourite suggestion)
2. Any changes you'd make to the suggestions (particularly your #1)
3. Any other suggestions you have
Many thanks,
Paul Glasziou
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SEARCH & NAVIGATION
1. Make the default search the Title and Abstract (and keywords) only.
It is very confusing that irrelevant studies studies appear because of
search terms appearing in the full text, e.g, in the references.
(a typical comment on this was: "I recently ran a session with a group of
students in Zambia on accessing a range of databases including Cochrane.
The topic search was fine, but it wasn't very clear whether you were
searching for abstracts, the whole review or 'other'. The other difficulty
we had was finding an easy route from the abstract to the full review.")
2. Results should be ranked in order of importance.
For example, if a term appears in the title this should give it a higher
ranking than the same term appearing in the abstract; other ranking
criteria could include number of hits and recency of update.
3. a PICO format search engine would be helpful
(The search fields would be the Patient population the Intervention the
Comparison and the Outcomes)
4. Make the Boolean operations clearer (this may be assisted by the PICO
format search engine which would use P AND I AND C AND O automatically).
"It is not possible to use Boolean operators in the advanced search fields
unless brackets are inserted; this is a confusing concept for many users.
For example:"otitis media with effusion"OR "glue ear"AND antibiotic
would actually look for:otitis media with effusion OR (glue ear AND
antibiotic) when of course want you would want is:(otitis media with
effusion OR glue ear) AND antibiotic"otitis media with effusion" or "glue
ear"AND antibiotic works fine, so as long all synonyms for a concept kept
together in a single search box."
Suggestion: if Booleans and brackets are inserted, then show the user the
bracketing before the search proceeds
5. Make Field specific searches easier.
It would be helpful if there were endings we could tag onto the end of
search terms to indicate what we want to search. For example; smith.au.
might mean we want to find an author named smith. Cot-death.ti. might mean
we want to find cot death in the title; heparin.me. might mean we want to
find the heparin MeSH heading and so on.2.
Is there a specific way to enter an authors name if you are searching for
an author? For example, is it Smith-MA, or Smith MA or Smith, MA ? It would
be helpful if how to search for an author were to be indicated on the
search page.
6. Make Review Groups easier to find.
Finding the Review Groups (they used to be clearly listed and you could
'Browse Review Groups'... now they are less helpfully listed as 'Topics'
(a very helpful feature!) and not easily found. So putting an icon or
something to flag a method of getting quickly to "review Groups' would be
great.
WEB INTERFACE
7. Reduce the Banner Size.
I'd love to see the size of the banner on the top of the screen (is search
results and record viewing windows - see attached) reduced. In resolutions
lower than 1024 x 768, the banner takes up more than half of the screen
space and you can hardly see any records.
8. Personalisation would really improve the stickability of the
resource. Make more of the alerting functionality to keep users up-to-date
about specific topics.
9. Make the site legal: Web site accessibility must be improved.
10. Create more consistent and focused navigation. The current combination
of Wiley header/footer and floating CLib navigation is unhelpful.
11. Provide a list of the top 10 reviews read - using impact scores ....
and perhaps provide a pop up impact score.
FEEDBACK MECHANISM
12. Feedback and discussion of content should be integrated within the site.
PRESENTATION OF REVIEWS
13. Provide absolute risk reductions.
As many of the medical journals are now requiring, I would like to see the
Cochrane mandate presentation of results (of those things described as
statistically different) in the abstract using absolute numbers wherever
possible.
14. Describe benefits according to a controlled vocabulary.
This would mean that review makes it explicit what type of benefit(s) an
outcome provides Comfort, Control, Cure, Prevention, …. (Or, equivalently,
the goal(s) of the intervention.) Many reviews use language like “there is
moderate evidence that intervention A is more effective than intervention
B”, but without stating the goal of the intervention. This makes it hard to
understand what the results really mean in terms of implementation. For
example, analgesics for neck pain are effective in terms of comfort, but
ineffective in terms of cure.
OTHER
15. Fix the citation dates confusion.
The citations for reviews are a constant source of confusion for therapists
and students. This is not a recent problem. It is great that there is a
description of how the review should be cited, however the site states the
year and issue that the document was located as the date of publication,
and not the year and issue that the review was last updated/placed on the
site. So we end up with students referencing a 2001 Cochrane review as 2004
or 2005, because the Cochrane library told them to reference it in that way.
16. Usability Testing.
Hands-on usability testing with real-life users would inform future
development and help create a much more relevant and useful resource.
Thanks to: Annie McCluskey, Martin Dawes, James McCormack, Jon Brassey,
Marina Waddington, Andre Tomlin, Tari Turner, Mima Cattan and Michael
Power for suggestions.
Paul Glasziou
Department of Primary Health Care &
Director, Centre for Evidence-Based Practice, Oxford
ph: 44-1865-227055 www.cebm.net
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