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A Biology Student’s Guide to Finding & Organizing NCBI Data for Research Projects


NCBI Faculty: Rana Morris, PhD and E. Sally Chang, PhD

Workshop Duration: 3 hours

Content Difficulty: Beginner

Target Audience:
This workshop is for life scientists at all experience levels, including student researchers and the educators and mentors who want to help students use these resources.

Workshop Description:

All biology research projects involve finding relevant literature and identifying related biological information. Often high school or new undergraduate students need guidance on how to effectively search for helpful information. For almost 35 years, the NCBI has provided free access to high-quality biological databases for the research community. In addition, we’ve created tools to help organize selected literature and biological data records for quick and easy access.

In this workshop you will learn how to:

  • Use the web interface to effectively search NCBI databases
  • Create and use your NCBI account to:
    • Save a search and set up weekly or monthly emails to notify you of new records
    • Store selected records in an online folder to access and share them
  • Find information related to a proposed research project topic across linked NCBI databases, from publications and associated genome sequences down to protein structures
  • Begin to interpret the information you’ve found in the context of the project

Data Access Technology: NCBI Website

NCBI Resources: PubMed, Taxonomy, Gene, Genome, Datasets, BLAST, Structure

Last Reviewed: May 18, 2023