Tips on how to search Tip 1: Use simple and clear keywords No matter what you are searching: a study, a dataset or a committee; the search will look recursively in all the fields of all the entities in the database. Thus, there is no need to specify which type of data you are looking for. Try to use single and specific words and avoid long and complex expressions. Try it out: cancer rna-seq instead of cancer studies using RNA-seq. Tip 2: Narrow your results using search operators Search operators give you more control over the results. They manage the way keywords are used to restrict the search. By default, the search engine applies an AND operator when a space is inserted between two words. Include OR (capitalised) between the keywords in your search in order to show pages containing either term or both terms. Try it out: Search all the studies based on transcriptomic data, including those ones that use RNA sequencing to obtain this data. Tip 3: Do not worry about details The search engine automatically checks for the most common spelling mistakes of given words and suggests the use of the correct version. It also ignores capital letters and most punctuation so none of these mistakes will hamper the accuracy of your search. Besides, when using a combination of words, the search engine will suggest similar combinations with a higher number of results. Tip 4: Use words that are likely to appear within the text Unfortunately, our search engine is not able to interpret words yet. Therefore, words which do not appear in the body text will not return any result despite them denoting a group of present terms. For instance, if we are looking for studies focused on neurological diseases, using neurological as a keyword would not be the best option. Instead, you should use the name of each neurological disease such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or depression. In the same fashion, incomplete words do not return any result. Please include an asterisk (*) before and/or after the incomplete word in order to allow for partial matching. Try it out: canc* instead of canc(without wildcard). Also you can try out *oma, or even *geneti* Tip 5: Narrow down your search by filtering the results You can filter the results by the following options: general, study, and dataset. Under these categories, you will find more sub-filters to refine your search. Make sure that you click on Apply in order to filter the results. You can clear the filtering anytime. Advanced Searches Additional example queries: Search for DUO:0000005 and word lung example query Or write: DUO:0000005 AND lung Search for an exome sequencing study in dbGaP example query Or write: study_type: "exome sequencing" AND repository:dbGaP Search for an exome sequencing study in EGA example query Or write: study_type: "exome sequencing" AND repository:ega Search for a dataset that is at the EGA beacon and with type "Whole genome sequencing" and with number of samples between 100 and 2000 and with technology "Illumina HiSeq 2000" example query Or write: is_in_beacon:true AND dataset_types:"Whole genome sequencing" AND samples:[100 TO 2000] AND dataset_technologies:"Illumina HiSeq 2000" Search for PMIDS example query Or write: pmids:32025007
