Ancillary studies are offshoots of a source study based on a subset of data of special interest. For example, you may want to explore multiple hypotheses on common data. You might create different ancillary studies in order to explore each of these hypotheses. Or you might use an ancillary study to support a followup study that uses a combination of the original data and more recently collected data.
When you create an ancillary study, LabKey Server creates a new folder (a child folder of the original study folder) and copies snapshots of the selected data into it in, assembling the subset in the form of a new study.
Note that ancillary studies are primarily intended for further interrogation of some common core of data; in contrast a "
published" study is primarily intended for presenting completed investigations to a new audience.
Create an Ancillary Study
- In your parent study, click the Manage tab.
- Click Create Ancillary Study, and complete the wizard, clicking Next after each panel.
- General Setup: Enter a name and description for the ancillary study, provide a protocol document, and select the new location. By default the new study is created as a child of the source study folder. You can select a different parent by clicking Change for the Location field.
- Participants: Either select one or more of the existing participant groups, or use all participants.
- Datasets: Choose the datasets to include.
- Choose whether and how to refresh these dataset snapshots. The choice you make here is initially applied to all datasets, but can be changed later for individual datasets, so that some datasets can be set to auto refresh, while others can be set to manual refresh.
- Automatic: When the source study data changes, automatically refresh the ancillary study.
- Manual: Don't refresh until an administrator manually does so.
- Click Finish.
The new ancillary study is now created.
Refresh Data Snapshots in an Ancillary Study
To update the data in the ancillary study:
- Navigate to the dataset that you would like to update in the ancillary study.
- Select > Edit Snapshot.
- Click Update Snapshot. Updating will replace all existing data with a new set. Confirm that this is your intent.
- You can also change whether this data is automatically refreshed from this page.
View Previously Created Ancillary Studies
Information about the creation of every ancillary and published study is stored in the table study.studySnapshot (located in the folder of the parent study). For further information, see
View Published Study Snapshot.
Using the settings stored in the study.studySnapshot table, you can also create a new ancillary study using previous settings by clicking
Republish for the set to use. You cannot create a new ancillary study using settings from a
published study, or vice versa.
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