Sorting of results.

[Chris-Evelo]

I am not sure how the default sorting of results is done if at all. But I think it would make sense to sort target relation based results on pCHEMBL value. For compounds based pathway searched (which can find pathways for many species) it would make sense to show the human ones first.

[danidi]

Currently the data is returned in default sorting from the API. On the pharmacology pages you can always change the sorting behaviour by clicking on one of the headers.
For the pathway page, this feature seems to be missing. Here, the pathways seem to be sorted alphabetically by pathway name currently.

[Chris-Evelo]

I know you can sort it. But when showing it to unexperienced users they responded first with "what a bunch of rubbish" (I was looking for VDR targeting compounds and found 25K plus hits) when I clicked the pCHEMBL sorting (which starts in the wrong direction from low to high, so I had to click twice) response was "ohh now it makes sense, but since I don't know what pCHEMBL is I would not have clicked that". Sorting pathways by species would make sense I think.

[danidi]

I'm assuming you were searching for the human Vitamin D3 Receptor? Here the problem is that the first assay is a Pubchem screening assay, which returns a lot of values for diverse compounds. In other cases it makes more sense to have the result sorted according to the publication, so that congeneric datasets are shown together (e.g. have a look at the results when you filter for IC50 values). Also not every data point has a pChembl value (e.g. all the datapoints from this screening assay lack the = sign, and therefore have no pChembl value assigned).
But maybe we should move this question to the support forum instead? There the users could give their opinion on it. I'm not sure what the best option would be.

A point for changing on the explorer I see here is to first sort pCHEMBL descending rather than ascending.

[ChristineChichester]

Please add this thread to a Explorer2 topic in the forum on the support portal

[ianwdunlop]

@Chris-Evelo I actually appreciate people telling me that "things are rubbish" because that's the only way I can improve the product! If there are some default sorts for the pharma pages that make sense then please let me know. However, I'm always wary that what one person thinks makes sense might differ from someone else so I am always keen to get a consensus of views before making the change.