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Step 0: Setting up an NCBI Account

A free solution for organizing your search results and so much more!


In today's workshop, we will be emphasizing the benefits of a free NCBI Account for tasks such as: 

  • Creating Collections to organize and save your search results so that you can quickly find them later.
  • Share a Collection with others.

For today's workshop we assume you have set up an NCBI Account - if you are interested in using one.


If you don't have one yet, it's easy to create an account:   

If you'd rather not, you can still fully participate in using the NCBI databases and tools, but if you want to save links so that you can easily find them again and share them - you may need to come up with your own way to do this (examples: browser bookmarks, copying and pasting into a document etc). 


Please note that NCBI Accounts are also useful for:
  • Saving and automating searches of various databases (both literature & molecular biology).
  • Saving your BLAST searches and results longer than without an account.
  • Setting your preferred sort mechanism for search results.
  • Highlighting search terms in your choice of color to make them easy to find.
  • Creating your own custom filters for quick and easy refinement of searches
  • Creating your own publication list (My Bibliography)
  • Creating Federal BioSketches (NIH, NSF, DoED) from stored information
  • For NIH grantees, producing your funded-publication reporting tables for Annual and Final Reports.
  • and you can keep track of everything – right on your My NCBI dashboard!

Last Reviewed: June 12, 2023