The phrase "a search in a database" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when referring to the act of looking for specific information within a database.
Example: "To find the required data, we conducted a search in a database containing all customer records."
Alternatives: "an inquiry in a database" or "a query in a database."
For example, after conducting a search in a ProQuest database for the terms "wind power" and "local government", you could set up an alert to be notified of any new articles that get added to the database with those keyword terms.
Domain-specific document collections and search engines, such as Google Scholar and PubMed, both already effectively demonstrate that a search in a target-focused database has clear advantages with respect to search within a broader and more general space.
A search in the database also identified a human sequence (DKFZp564E153, EMBL/GenBank acc. #: AL049257) presenting a very high degree of sequence conservation over 2.5 kb with the 3' part of our dog cDNA (fig. 2).
And I said, it would be much easier to find a girlfriend if I could just search in a database for what I wanted".
A blastp search in a database of predicted genes was performed to detect the PEDF gene in fugu [ 50].
Each gene was then used as a query for a BlastP [ 57] search in a database consisting of the proteomes of 14 vertebrates (Table 1) with almost complete genomes from the Ensembl (version 51) database [ 36].
A search in the Oncomine database revealed an expression of Piwi-like 3 in carcinomas of the breast, colon, ovary and brain and for Piwi-like 4 in carcinomas of the breast, liver and brain.
A search in genetic databases turned up a surprise.
Based on a search in relevant databases and a quality assessment, eleven articles were included in the review.
We performed a search in the databases of Medline, Embase, and the Cochrane Library from January 1990 to April 2012.
