Creating an account
The registration form for creating an account can be accessed from the login screen:
- Click on the “Login” tab on the home page
- Click “sign up” in the sentence below the page heading
- Complete all fields and click “Sign Up”
The new account will then be verified and a confirmation email will be sent to the email account specified.
NOTE: an institutional email address should be used for registration.
Doing an advanced search (login required)
After login, users are able to access the advanced search tool by clicking on ‘Filter’ in the lefthand side menu or clicking on the ‘Filter’ tab at the top righthand corner of the screen.
In order to identify relevant datasets or biospecimens, researchers can filterii catalogue content by:
- Study characteristics: study acronym, study design (eg. case-control), primary disease
- Participant characteristicsiii: disease status, ethnicity, gender, countryiv
- Dataset characteristics: EGA/ENA accession, data type
- Biospecimen characteristics: specimen type
NOTE:
ii Filters which apply exclusively to datasets or biospecimens are indicated by yellow or green icons, respectively.
iii If the data for a biospecimen is not yet in the EGA, no metadata will be available for the related participant.
iv “Country” refers to the origin of the biospecimen, i.e. the participant’s country of residence, which may not coincide with the participant’s nationality.
Figure 5: Doing an advanced search
Once the filtering criteria have been set, the user can click on the blue ‘Apply filter’ button (figure 5) to produce a table of results.
The table of results (see figure 6) includes links to:
- a more detailed description of the study as well as its associated datasets and/or biospecimens (click on the study acronym)
- (for datasets only) the corresponding entry on the European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA) website (click on the EGA accession)
- (for datasets only) information regarding the Data Use Ontology (DUO) codes associated with a particular dataset (click on “details”, in the DUO codes column)
NOTE:
If a participant included in the search output is linked to multiple studies, all of these studies will appear in the search output.