Defining a Study

As a researcher you are free to define studies as you need. Here are some tips and constraints to help you.

Investigation - larger topic with several standalone subquestions. Size of PhD, or the work of several researchers combined. Typically a PI will have a plan for how the investigations are defined.

Study - roughly the size of a paper. A standalone set of relevant data that together answers a research question. Multiple people can work together on a study.

If you perform several experiments on the same plants and need to combine the results to interpret them, group these experiments in one study. It is not possible to directly reference plants/samples in another study. If plants are grown in the same batch but split up to answer different questions, it is usually best to make separate studies. You can simply copy the growth conditions to each study.

While CropXR does not require this, MIAPPE assumes that a study is in a single location. If you wish to stay close to the MIAPPE format, be sure to separate measurements performed at different locations into different studies.

Naming your study

Choose a name that tells other researchers in the consortium what the study is about, without having to open it. A good study name:

• describes the research question or the main experiment, for example the treatment and the response that is measured
• includes the organism or crop
• avoids abbreviations and internal project codes that only your group knows

For example:

Drought response of arabidopsis after hormonal treatment with PAMP

The naming conventions for assays and other items in the catalogue can be found in the Catalogue Reference.

No separate registration step

There is no separate registration form. All metadata goes into the data catalogue, and that is where you register your investigation and study.