My NCBI: Overview & Benefits
What is the purpose?
Over the course of their scientific careers, program directors and principal investigators (PD/PIs) create and maintain extensive professional bibliographies, which include publications resulting from or in support of their funded research grants. NIH provides Commons users with an efficient, accurate and user-friendly way to manage their professional bibliographies, associate publications with their grant awards, and track and maintain compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy.
eRA Commons has partnered with the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) to link NCBI’s personal online portal, “My NCBI,” to Commons. My NCBI includes a tool called “My Bibliography,” where users can create and manage a list of all of their authored works, such as journal articles, manuscripts accepted for publication, books, and book chapters. Linking a Commons account to a new or existing My NCBI account allows bibliography information saved in My Bibliography to automatically appear in users’ Commons accounts.
What has changed?
- Commons no longer supports manual entry of citations. PD/PIs cannot type or copy and paste citation data into Commons and must enter new citations into their My NCBI accounts via My Bibliography.
- Commons no longer display citations that a PI has manually entered into Commons. All citations previously entered manually into Commons have been removed from the Commons system.
What are the benefits?
- PD/PIs can use the My Bibliography tool in My NCBI to save and organize bibliographical information. My Bibliography allows users to store and manipulate references for any number of uses, even those not related to NIH grants.
- PD/PIs can use My Bibliography’s search option to query PubMed (using standard PubMed search options) in order to find and save PubMed citations to their My Bibliography list of citations, instead of having to manually enter the bibliography entries.
- My Bibliography also allows users to manually enter and save bibliography entries that are not indexed in PubMed.
- PD/PIs can export citations from My Bibliography in MEDLINE format, for import into other citation manager databases.
- PD/PIs can assign delegates to maintain the information in their My Bibliography account.
- My Bibliography maintains a consistent citation format and warns users of duplicate bibliography entries, which ensures uniform and accurate data. The improved data quality resulting from the My NCBI – eRA Commons integration enhances the ability of the NIH to manage and monitor the results of its research portfolio.
- In My Bibliography, PD/PIs can associate grant awards to one or more citations. In eRA Commons, PD/PIs can associate citations saved in My Bibliography to an eSNAP progress report.
- Within My Bibliography, PD/PIs can track compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy.
- My Bibliography’s handy key assigns a color code (indicating the compliance status of) to each citation.
- PD/PIs can initiate, or an author can continue, the manuscript submission process through My Bibliography’s direct link to the NIH Manuscript Submission System (NIHMS).
- Citations entered and stored in My Bibliography will automatically update with PMCIDs when they become available.
Related links
- NIH Guide Notice (contains information concerning the timing of the My NCBI / eRA Commons integration):
- My NCBI Help
- NIH Public Access Policy
