How to add your publications to SciENcv for your NIH biosketch

Where SciENcv gets your publications

When you add products to an NIH biosketch in SciENcv, it offers you two lists to choose from: the citations in your My Bibliography (part of your My NCBI account) and the works on your linked ORCID record. Nothing else. If a paper isn’t in either, you can’t select it.

The biosketch only has room for a few: section C, “Products”, takes up to five products closely related to the proposed project and up to five other significant products. But you want the full list in My Bibliography so you can choose the right ten for each application, not just the ones that happened to be there.

My Bibliography is the better route for NIH. Citations added from PubMed carry their PMID and PMCID, which NIH’s public access reporting relies on, and My Bibliography is also where you associate papers with your awards. Library guides also report that opening the ORCID tab in SciENcv can copy ORCID works into My Bibliography as duplicate manual citations — so if you use both, check for duplicates.

Before you start

• An NCBI account. Sign in at My NCBI with login.gov, eRA Commons, ORCID or another supported sign-in.
• An ORCID iD. NIH now requires one from everyone who prepares a biosketch, and senior and key personnel must link it to their eRA Commons account — whichever way you add publications.
• Optional: link eRA Commons to My NCBI. PubMed citations associated with your NIH awards are then added to My Bibliography for you. Papers from before your NIH funding, or never associated with an award, still need adding yourself.

Option 1: add publications from PubMed

Good for a handful of papers, or for topping up a list that is mostly complete.

1. Search PubMed for your publications. (Our guide to finding all of an author’s publications covers the search syntax.)
2. Tick the papers that are yours. Double-check any name you share with someone else.
3. Choose Send to → My Bibliography and confirm. My Bibliography skips citations it already holds.

If you already have a list of PMIDs, paste them into the PubMed search box separated by spaces — PubMed returns exactly those papers — then send all the results at once.

Option 2: upload a file of citations

My Bibliography also accepts a file of citations in MEDLINE format (PubMed’s own format, often saved as .nbib or .txt) or RIS, which most reference managers export. This is the quickest way to add a long list in one go.

1. Export your publications as a MEDLINE or RIS file.
2. Open My Bibliography and sign in.
3. Choose Manage My Bibliography, then Add citations → From a file, and upload the file.
4. If NCBI finds a matching PubMed record for a citation and asks whether to use it, say yes. The citation then becomes a full PubMed entry rather than a manual one.

Choose the publications for your biosketch

1. In SciENcv, create a new document using the Biographical Sketch Common Form (or open an existing one).
2. In section C, Products, select from your My Bibliography citations — up to five closely related to the project and up to five other significant products.
3. Finish the rest of the form, then certify and download it as a PDF for your application.

Note that the NIH Biographical Sketch Supplement — personal statement, honors and contributions to science — takes no citations at all. Your publications appear in the Common Form only.

Keeping it current

My Bibliography doesn’t find your new papers on its own, apart from those linked to your NIH awards. Before each application, add anything new since the last time — from PubMed, or by uploading a fresh file — so the list SciENcv offers is complete.