Professors, you’re busy – really busy. You have to develop and teach your courses and laboratory sessions, coordinate your lab’s research efforts, write grants and publications, and stay current on everything related to your teaching and research topics.

NCBI has information that would help most of these efforts – but there are so many interesting records and so little time to organize them for efficient use. Sign up for a free NCBI Account and let us help you organize your important lists!

Sign up for an NCBI Account – or sign in to your account if you already have one – and:

• Store and automate your searches;
• Save and manage collections of important records for use in coursework, research projects and federal grants;
• Create public lists for students in your courses and your own Faculty Profile;
• And keep track of everything – right on your My NCBI dashboard.

Read on to find out how to do all of these things and more!

Store and Automate Search Strategies

You perform PubMed searches all the time. You might also search our Gene, Nucleotide, Protein or PubChem Compound databases, to name a few.

• Save your searches and re-run them with a simple click
• Set up searches to run automatically and send an email notifying you of new records

Save Search Results

You perform a search and get a whole list of results, but you don’t have time to go through them right away. There are two things you can do:

• Save your search results for later analysis
• Retrieve various searches, filter the results, and even perform comparisons between result lists

Manage Search Results Lists & Collections

You have lots of result lists saved, but you’d really like to be able to create and organize custom sets of records – maybe create new collections you can quickly add interesting records to.

• Set up custom collections to store PubMed or Gene or Protein records that you find interesting

These collections could support your research and teaching efforts in a number of ways. You could store lecture or grant reference lists for research and development; create public lists for course or seminar references, or a reading list for your lab personnel, or a set of important records for a laboratory section, or any number of other uses.

• Quickly export a whole list of records
• Make a collection public

Setting Up Your Journal Club/Research Lab Group

• Create a collection to store and link background information needed for members to review
• Create and update a collection to publicize the list of publications up for review and discussion; direct links to PMC will enable participants to access full text articles anywhere
• Sign up with PubMed Commons to make comments on discussed papers

Create Your Own Bibliographic Collection

My Bibliography, a special type of collection at NCBI, is an important and useful thing to have either listed or linked on your Faculty webpage. In addition, did you know that you can use your bibliography collection to make it easier to apply for and manage NIH-funded grants?

• Create a bibliography of your publications – even if you have changed your name, published under different versions of your name, or included references that aren’t in PubMed, like textbooks or research reports
• Make your bibliography public with a live URL to embed in your Faculty webpage
• Generate and automatically pre-populate an NIH or NSF Biosketch
• Monitor your government-funded research publications for that all-important Public Access Policy compliance

Bookmark this post and refer to it whenever you need guidance – NCBI accounts are here to help you organize your research and teaching efforts and make your life easier. Feel free to leave questions, comments and suggestions on this post.

Other Helpful References & Links

There are a few other posts on this blog that you may want to read:

• My Bibliography and SciENcv: How to Delegate Authority to Others to Edit/Create Your Profile and Collections
• Advice for NIH Grantees: How to Comply with the NIH Public Access Policy

• Quick Tips