Getting Started

New users should register at http://sdb.cns.iu.edu as an IU or Non-IU user. All account applications are reviewed by the SDB team and account approvals are sent out via email.

Approved users should go to http://sdb.cns.iu.edu and login with their email and password. Please contact the SDB team at cns-sdb-dev-l@indiana.edu to retrieve forgotten email addresses and/or passwords.

Supported Functionality

SDB supports search across paper, patent, and funding databases. To search, select a year range and database(s) and enter search term(s) in creators (author/awardee/inventor), title, abstract, and full text (keywords and other text) fields.

If multiple terms are entered in a field, they are automatically combined using 'OR'. So, 'breast cancer' matches any record with 'breast' or 'cancer' in that field. You can put AND between terms to combine with 'AND'. Thus 'breast AND cancer' would only match records that contain both terms. Double quotation can be used to match compound terms, e.g., '"breast cancer"' retrieves records with the phrase "breast cancer", and not records where 'breast' and 'cancer' are both present, but not the exact phrase. The importance of a particular term in a query can be increased by putting a ^ and a number after the term. For instance, 'breast cancer^10' would increase the importance of matching the term 'cancer' by ten compared to matching the term 'breast'.

Downloading

Search results retrieved from different databases can be downloaded as data dump in csv file format. Note that each database has a different download format. The download limit can be found in your personal profile. If you need to download a larger number of records, please contact the SDB team at cns-sdb-dev-l@indiana.edu with details of your intended usage.

Edit Profile

Please update your personal information regularly. The profiles are used to report the utility of the SDB to private and federal sponsors which fund the development, deployment, and maintenance of the SDB.

Technical Details

All data is stored in a PostgreSQL database. Full-text search is supported using Solr to index the contents of the database. Solr is an industry-standard, open source search server that can scale to very large amounts of data using replication and sharing. The online interface was developed in Django. Django is a web framework written in the Python programming language with particularly good support for content-oriented web applications.

Issues and Comments

Please report any bugs or other issues and provide comments to the SDB team via cns-sdb-dev-l@indiana.edu.

Attachments:

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