Using the PhenX Toolkit to Add Standard Measures to a Study.

ABSTRACT

The PhenX (consensus measures for Phenotypes and eXposures) Toolkit (https//www.phenxtoolkit.org/) offers high-quality, well-established measures of phenotypes and exposures for use by the scientific community. The Toolkit contains 295 measures drawn from 21 research domains (fields of research). The measures were selected by Working Groups of domain experts using a consensus process that included input from the scientific community. The Toolkit provides a description of each PhenX measure, the rationale for including it in the Toolkit, protocol(s) for collecting the measure, and supporting documentation. Users can browse by measures, domains, or collections, or can search the Toolkit using the Smart Query Tool. Once users have selected some measures, they can download a customized Data Collection Worksheet that specifies what information needs to be collected, and a Data Dictionary that describes each variable included in their Data Collection Worksheet. To help researchers find studies with comparable data, PhenX measures and variables are being mapped to studies in the database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP).