Key Concepts
Key concepts for getting the most out of Study Tracker
Defining your projects
Study Tracker breaks down projects into several entities: programs, studies, and assays. There is enough flexibility in the application to allow you to define these entities in whatever way you'd like, but by sticking to the following hierarchy, you will get the most out of Study Tracker's features.
Programs
Programs are loosely defined as long-running efforts by teams or departments to deliver on organization-level goals. These can be drug discovery projects, broader research efforts (eg. target identification), or house-keeping work (eg. animal facility care or lab maintenance). Programs are top-level entities in Study Tracker, but have little metadata associated with them, other than a name, description, and code (used for deriving study codes), and primarily serve as buckets for collecting work, defined as studies. They have no defined start or end and are generally assumed to be continuous efforts, until they are marked as inactive.
Studies
Studies are the primary unit of work in Study Tracker, intended to be finite efforts to complete a specific goal or answer a specific question. Studies can be used to capture long-running experiments (such as animal studies), or short-term activities (such as processing sequencing data). What work a study actually consists of is entirely up to the team performing it. To support this flexibility, only a minimal set of information is required when registering a new study in Study Tracker:
The parent Program the study is associated with
A unique name
A brief description of the study objective
List of study team members
Start date
Additional information can be provided, but it is not required. For more granular activity and record tracking, one-or-more assays can be created within studies.
Assays
Assays represent smaller units of work defined within studies, and allow for the capture of more specific experiment metadata, as well as an explicit checklist of tasks to be completed.
Study Codes
Study codes are unique identifiers generated every time a new study is registered in Study Tracker. They are intended both to identify study records within Study Tracker, as well as outside it, to help tie study information together throughout your information ecosystem. Study codes are generated by combining an alphanumeric prefix, defined by the program, and a numerical suffix, representing the count of studies within the program. Studies that have been flagged as external studies are also given a second external study code, which strips away program-specific identifiers, to allow for sharing outside of your organization. Assays are also assigned assay codes, which are a concatenation of the parent study code and a numerical counter representing the total number of assays within the parent program.
When to use Study Tracker
How your team uses Study Tracker will depend on the work you are doing and the other tools you are required to use to capture that work. At a minimum, Study Tracker should be the first place you go when planning a new study and the last place you go before moving on to the next one. One important thing to emphasize: despite having the ability to capture detailed notes, Study Tracker is not an electronic laboratory notebook (ELN), and should not be used as one. Below is an illustration of a basic study workflow, outlining the steps one would take to document a study, starting with creation of a study record in Study Tracker.
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