General Practitioners and community nurses rely on easily accessible, evidence-based online information to guide practice. To date, the methods that underpin the scoping of user-identified online information needs in palliative care have remained under-explored. This paper describes the benefits and challenges of a collaborative approach involving users and experts that informed the first stage of the development of a palliative care website

When using a conventional relational database approach to collect and query data in the context of specific clinical studies, a study with a new data set usually requires the design of a new database and entry forms. OpenSDE (SDE = Structured Data Entry) is intended to provide a flexible and intuitive way to create databases and entry forms for the collection of data in a structured format. This study illustrates the use of OpenSDE as a potential alternative to a conventional approach with respect to data modelling, database creation, data entry, and data extraction.

Collaboration among investigators has become critical to scientific research. The authors present a novel strategy for building investigator networks dynamically and producing detailed investigator profiles using data available in PubMed abstracts.

It is difficult to systematically search for literature relevant to palliative care in general medical journals. A previously developed search filter for use on OVID Medline validated using a gold standard set of references identified through hand searching, achieved an unacceptably low sensitivity (45.4%). Retrieving relevant literature is integral to support evidence based practice, and understanding the nature of the incorrectly excluded citations (false negatives) using the filter may lead to improvement in the filter's performance. The objectives of this study were to describe the nature of subjects reflected in the false negative citations and to empirically improve the sensitivity of the search filter. The authors concluded that the filter's sensitivity was successfully increased using frequency analysis of MeSH terms, offset by a decrease in precision.

This randomized trial was designed as a pilot study to measure the relevancy of search results using three different interfaces for the PubMed search system. Two of the search interfaces utilized a specific framework called PICO, which was designed to focus clinical questions and to prompt for publication type or type of question asked.

The aim of this study was to provide clinicians with recommendations for search strategies to efficiently identify relevant CPGs in SUMSearch and Google Scholar.

Healthcare informatics is an emerging profession in the UK, and both government and health-informatics practitioners recognise a need to advance its formalisation and development. The results of the study reported in this article identify a consensus on six actions that could be taken to progress those aims, from which four recommendations are derived.

Concerned about evidence-based health informatics, the authors conducted a limited pilot survey attempting to determine how many IT evaluation studies in health care are never published, and why. Reasons for not publishing (with multiple reasons per study possible) included: "results not of interest for others", "publication in preparation", "no time for publication", "limited scientific quality of study", "political or legal reasons", and "study only conducted for internal use".