NIH biosketches 2015

Here are some tips from Paul Macey about the new biosketch format. These are additional to the guide, which contains quite detail instructions of what to write. The key time-consuming steps are section C "Contribution to science" and creating your online "My Bibliography."

Personal statement

The personal statement is similar to before in terms of explaining your role and expertise with this project, but with the option to add four papers or other items (presentations, patents, books). These four items can showcase pilot studies or even abstracts that might be too small for the "Contribution to science" section; they can also illustrate the co-investigators working together, or a specific expertise. 

Contribution to science

A great way to get started on your contributions to science is to view your publications ordered by citation count. To do that, go to Web of Science, search for your name in Author ("Add Another Field" if you need to filter by institution or co-authors), and order the list by Times Cited. I found this very helpful in seeing what other people find useful in my work (brief comment below).

Search

Sort

Paul's example.

I noticed through looking at the first 20-30 papers in this order that people cited our fMRI papers a lot, so I realized I needed to emphasize these papers. I knew my OSA structural paper (with the most citations) would be a key citation on one contribution, but my second most cited paper is a methods one that this list made me realize I should emphasize.

Link to Bibliography

Biosketches must include a link to a publicly available bibliography. The recommended way to do this is using the NIH-provided My Bibliography.

Create NCBI bibliography

To get started, from PubMed go to "NCBI"

Or, go to MyNCBI (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

If you have an eRA Commons account, log in with that.

Otherwise, create a new account by clicking on "Register for an NCBI account"

Add references to My Bibliography

Once you are logged in, you can copy your citations to your bibliography in NCBI:

Make sure you are logged in

Search for your references (1), select them (2) or leave blank to select all, click "Send to:" (3), choose "My Bibiography" (4), click "Add to My Bibiography" (5).

To view and edit My Bibliography

Once logged in, go to My NCBI

Click "Managed My Bibliography" to add or edit citations. You can add presentations and items other than journal articles (these are categorized separately in My Bibliography).

The URL is what you should include in your biosketch.

Tip: change "ascending" to "descending" to order most recent first.

PMCID's

What and Why

NIH requires PMCID's for all papers in the biosketch, where available. PMCID is the PubMed Central ID, where PubMed Central is a full-text publication repository (like a journal site), as opposed to PubMed which is a search database only. (In other words, PubMed links to other sites but does not store the full-text papers.) The reason this is required is as a verification of compliance with the law passed by congress in 2008 mandating public availability of publicly-funded research.

How

Endnote and MyBlibliography automatically obtain the PMCID's. Otherwise, they are visible on the PubMed abstract pages (below), or from PubMed Central itself.

PMID or PMCID

The PMID is the PubMed ID, and since PubMed does not contain the full-text, this ID does not indicate anything about compliance with the law. Obviously the choice of "PubMed Central" as a name is unfortunate as it is confused with "PubMed", and hence the frequent mix-up between PMCID's and PMID's.

1234567 or PMC1234567?

When PMCID's were first created, they were a 7 digit number, which was confusing as the PMID is an 8 digit number. In 2015, the PMCID has changed to be the 7 digit number preceded by the letters "PMC". The October 2015 version of Endnote (X7.4) now downloads the PMCID as "PMC1234567" whereas earlier versions would only download the 7 digits.

Tip: from Endnote 7.4, you can right-click over the reference and use "Find Reference Updates" to update the PMCID and other fields: