Search Tips

The following are some suggestions that may help you find what you're looking for if you're having trouble searching. For a full listing of advanced search options available on BioGRID ORCS, visit our advanced search information page:

• Don't use ambiguous names. When possible, search for unique identifiers or systematic names. Many identifiers across the different species are duplicated, and as a result, may not uniquely identify a specific record. The more unique the identifier, the better your chance of getting a direct hit on searches.
• Make sure the identifier you're searching for is supported. Check out our list of supported identifiers if you're not sure.
• Try being less specific. For example, if you searched for STE11, try searching for STE and see if more results are returned.
• If you are searching with “ALL ORGANISMS” selected, try being more specific and choosing your organism of interest like Mus musculus or Homo sapiens. Our search engine always attempts to make a direct match first, before using wild cards so. For example, if you search for KSS, you may get KSS in Human when you were really looking for KSS1 in Yeast. Setting the organism to the correct organism, however, will result in skipping the invalid match hit only.
• Make sure you are using the correct spelling.
• Try to use alternative identifiers. Many genes have synonyms, official names, and systematic names. If one name is not returning the result you expect, try searching for an alternative name for the same gene.
• Try using a wildcard search. If your searches for STE11 are coming up empty, try searching for STE* for a list of all identifiers starting with STE.
• Don't use invalid characters. For identifier searches, the only valid characters are: english alphabet (A-Z), numbers 0-9, hyphen -, round brackets ( ), period ., underscore _, and star *.

• For a comprehensive listing of options and examples of publication searches, visit our advanced search information page.
• Some words are automatically ignored from searches simply because they are too common. For a complete listing of the most common words that are blocked, you can visit the MySQL Full-Text Stopwords Listing. If you search for just the words “to” and “from”, your search will return no results because both words are ignored. If you search for “Protein to Complex” you may get results because protein and complex are both valid while “to” is simply ignored.
• Try searching for less terms. For example, if you searched for +BREAST +CANCER and it returned no results, try searching for BREAST or CANCER to see if more results return. Better yet, use do an OR search. For example BREAST CANCER, which will search for papers containing BREAST or CANCER or BREAST CANCER.
• Group terms together using quotes “ if you are looking for a specific phrase. For example, if you are interest in papers on breast cancer, rather than searching for breast cancer which will return papers containing 1 or more of those terms, search for “breast cancer” which will instead search for that exact phrase and only return papers that match.
• Make sure you are using the correct spelling.
• Make sure you haven't mixed Pubmed IDs in with Keyword terms. If you searched for “20634885 DIABETES” our search will automatically discard the word DIABETES and assume you meant to do a pubmed ID search. You can search for multiple pubmed ids like “20634885 20605454 20237159” or keyword terms like “DIABETES CANCER HERPES” but you can't search for both simulataneously.
• If you are getting a huge number of results, try removing keywords from your search to help improve accuracy. For example, if you were looking for Kinase papers, but were not interested in Saccharomyces cerevisiae results, you could search for “Kinase -cerevisiae” or “Kinase -yeast” to retrieve more accurate matches.
• Don't use invalid characters. For publication searches, the only valid characters are: english alphabet (A-Z), numbers 0-9, hyphen -, round brackets ( ), period ., underscore _, plus sign +, double quotes ”, angled brackets < >, tilde ~, forward slash /, and star *.

• For all the controlled vocabulary search options (all other options besides gene and publication searches, examples: Enzyme, Condition, Cell Line etc.) we highly recommend you use the provided drop down list as a means for selecting terms you want to see. These lists are the definitive versions of available search terms and you will avoid mistakes by using the dropdown to make selections. In the event that a term you expect to be in the list is not available, it's likely simply because we have no yet curated a dataset in which that term was used to annotate it.