In this video, I'm going to show you how to set up a My NCBI account.
A My NCBI account is a personal account that you can have for free that will allow you,
when using PubMed, to save searches, to email things to yourself, to set up search alerts
if you should so choose to do so, and it's very easy to sign up for.
Regardless of the page you're on, in the top right corner will be a link to sign in to NCBI.
When you find this link and you click on it, you'll come to a page that looks like this.
If you have an account already, you'll be able to go ahead and type it in, and if you
don't then you can come down and register for a NCBI account.
Now as you do that, you'll come here and it will ask you to fill in some information.
Like in this case, it'll ask me for a username, which I can go ahead and put in, and you'll
notice that as it does it, it's also telling me whether or not the username has been used.
Then I can come up with a password - as you can see, this only takes a minute - as well as an email address.
And so I'll want to put in a valid email address, and there it goes.
Then it will ask you to come up with a question that you can unlock the account with, and
then you can continue to go through this.
Keep in mind that once you fill this out, that it's important that you be able to remember
your username and password or at least remember the question and answer you have provided in order to unlock your account.
Because as you do that, you'll be able to find things if you should forget it.
Now once you have signed up for your account, you'll come to a page that looks like this
once you've answered the rest of the questions you've submitted it.
From here you'll see, "You are now logged in," and you can click here to continue to
your My NCBI account, and what you'll notice is any time that you're signed in, you'll
see your username up here at the top.
Then if you would like to see your My NCBI things you just come over to My NCBI, click
on it, and it'll take you to a page that looks like this.
The nice thing about this page is you'll notice is that, any searches that you have done will
always show up here, and it's something I really like about this.
So if for some reason now if my computer should shut down, or if I should get disconnected
from the internet and I should lose everything or I'd have to shut down my computer, my recent
activity or my recent searches will be saved.
And that's why I always encourage people, if you have one of these accounts, to continue
to keep yourself signed in because if for something should happen where you have to
step away, or your computer shuts down, you haven't lost all of your work.
You'll notice that under this My NCBI as well is you can go to My NCBI Site Preferences,
and what's really nice about this is if you click on it, you can come to a point that
will show you a couple ways that you can go and adjust your preferences.
The one place I like to go in order to adjust some preferences so that I don't have to continue
to mess around is, I've told you in previous videos, the only place that you can see the
Get It At VCU button in PubMed is to be in the abstract display setting.
Well, if you come to the preferences tab and click on it, you'll get to this point and
you'll see here, here is PubMed preferences.
You can click on Results Display and you'll notice it'll ask you, "Which format would you like it in?"
You can take it and switch it from summary to abstract, and you can also change the number of items per page.
I always suggest at least 100.
And then click Save.
And what will happen then is, once I scroll down here and go back to PubMed you'll notice
I'm still signed in, and now if I should do a search - say, a keyword search for just
nursing - I will automatically have all of my results displayed in abstract format, so I can see the Get It At VCU button.
And that is how you set up a My NCBI account and how you can adjust it so your display
settings automatically default to abstract once you're signed in, which will be helpful
to you in not only being able to see the abstract but to access the Get It At VCU button.