Did you know that you can create a personal account in PubMed to keep track of your search history, set up search alerts, create collections of PubMed records, and customize your search experience?
You can link your existing Google, Microsoft, eRA Commons, ORCiD and other third-party accounts to create a My NCBI account. Once you’ve linked your account, you can view the My NCBI tools and features by going to the Dashboard – simply click on your account name in the upper right corner and select ‘Dashboard’ from the pop-up.
The Recent Activity section provides you access to your search activity for the last 6 months across the NCBI databases, including PubMed. The searches and records in the list are hyperlinked to allow you easy access to your past queries.
Search alerts can be created for any search – simply click on the “Create alert” below the PubMed search box. You can select to either receive automatic emails whenever new items are added to PubMed that match your search (the frequency can be set to daily, weekly or monthly) or the alert can simply sit within your My NCBI account and a running tally will appear of new items and the last date that you accessed the alert.
The Collections feature allows you to add records to a group within your My NCBI account. There is no limit to the number of collections that you can create in your account. Collections can either be kept private or you can set them to public, in which case a URL will be generated to your Collection that you can share with others. The link will take them to the live version of the collection and will reflect any additions or deletions that you make to it.
To add records to a Collection, simply use the “Send To” drop down at the top of any results list or record page and select “Collections.” You can either create a new collection or add to an existing collection.
Your My NCBI account also allows you make preset preferences for the NCBI resources. This includes setting an Outside Tool to display our Find It @ Sladen button.
Click on the “NCBI Site Preferences” in the upper right corner of your Dashboard to access the Preferences menu. Under PubMed Preferences, set the Outside Tool to “Henry Ford Hospital, Sladen Library” to make our Find It @ Sladen button appear whenever you are logged into your account and searching PubMed.
Other preferences include preset filters (such as English, Free Full Text, Humans, and Published in the last 5 Years), Results Display Settings (Summary vs Abstract view; we recommend Abstract view), and automatically display Author Information.
Another useful preference setting is to turn on highlighting for your search terms (under Common Preferences). PubMed will highlight all of your search terms where they appear within a results list. This makes it much easier to quickly scan through the results and determine if they are relevant to your topic. For more information about the My NCBI account and step-by-step directions for setting up search alerts, creating and managing collections and changing your preferences, please see the My NCBI Help Manual.
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