Getting started

Overview

Redivis is a platform that allows researchers to seamlessly discover, access, and analyze data. This brief guide will walk you through the basics to get up and running and provide a launching point for exploring other resources in this documentation.

1. Create your account

Many datasets on Redivis are public, and you can browse them without creating an account. However, you'll need an account in order to analyze data, as well as to apply for access to restricted datasets.

Click the Create account button in the top right of any page to sign up. You can use your academic institution's login credentials or any Google account.

Once you create an account, you'll be navigated to your Workspace, which is your private area for creating workflows to work with data, uploading your own datasets, and managing your Redivis account.

2. Join your organization

The main entity on Redivis is a dataset. Most datasets on Redivis are uploaded by organizations.

You might already know the organization that you’ll be working with, or you can browse organizations by clicking the Find organizations button on the Organizations tab your Workspace. You might know your organization's URL already, or see it listed in the Recent section of the Dashboard if you were already viewing that page.

Once you join an organization, you'll be able to apply for any of their restricted datasets, and also see a link on the left bar of your workspace to quickly get back to the organization's home page.

3. Find datasets

The best place to find datasets on Redivis is to search on an organization's home page. Here you can click on the Datasets tab to browse all datasets and filter by their metadata. All searches perform a full-text search across a dataset, its documentation, tables, variables, and rich metadata content.

If your organization is part of an institution (such as Stanford or Columbia) you can also go to the institution page to search all datasets in your institution.

Click on any dataset title to go to that Dataset page where you can view the data and metadata it contains. The data for this dataset will be available on the Tables tab, which you can explore further.

You will also probably come across restricted datasets. For these you will need to click the Apply for access button on the top right of the Dataset page and complete the requirements to gain approval from the dataset's administrators.

Learn more in the Discover & access data guide.

4. Analyze data

Once you've found a dataset that you want to work with, you can add it to a Workflow. Workflows are the fundamental analysis interface on Redivis, where you can query, merge, reshape, and analyze any dataset that you have access to — all from within your web browser.

Add a dataset to a workflow by clicking the Add to workflow button on the top right of the dataset page.

In a workflow we can create a Transform by selecting any table and clicking the +Transform button, which allows us to combine and reshape our data into a final output table that best serves our analysis. These transforms use a powerful SQL engine under the hood, allowing us to query incredibly large tables - even billions of records - in seconds.

After creating output tables for analysis, we can create a computational Notebook in R, Python, Stata, or SAS to further analyze our data and develop our final figures. Select any table and click the +Notebook button to get started. The notebook will initialize and pull in the table you've selected (or a sample of the table if it is a large table).

We can also export and query this table from external environments, allowing us to use whatever analytical tools best suit our research question by clicking the Export table button on the right side of any table. Here we can download the table in a number of common formats, interface with the it programmatically via the API, or export the table to supported integrations.

Learn more in the Analyze data in a workflow guide.

Next steps

Upload your own datasets

Augment your data analysis in Redivis by uploading your own datasets, with the option to share with your collaborators (or even the broader research community).

Learn more in the Create & manage datasets guide.

Administer your organization

Organizations allow for research groups and centers to securely distribute data to their research community. Organization administrators can create datasets, manage access, review logs, and create customized reports of their data utilization.

Contact an existing administrator to add you to their organization, or contact us to set up a new organization. Learn more in the Administer an organization guide.