Application of SSEA to the two schizophrenia data sets resulted in the discovery of 22 pathways in the EA data set and 11 pathways in the AA data set with the nominal P-value less than or equal to 0.001. Using this P-value cut-off, the overall FDR is controlled within 5% for both data sets. The list of identified pathways from each sample is shown in Additional file 1 and 2, together with the related gene information.