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Creating an NIH Biosketch

A guide to best practices for creating an NIH Biosketch.

Citation Tips

A few quick notes about citations for your biosketch:

  • Be consistent in the style you use for citations.
  • NIH does not require a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) or PMID (PubMed reference number) with each reference in the biosketch. However, NIH does require a PMCID or other evidence of compliance with the public access policy for papers that fall under the policy and are authored by the applicant or arise from an applicant’s NIH award. The PMCID will be posted in PubMed once an article has been successfully processed by PubMed Central. You can also find PMCIDs for articles with the converter tool that is available from NCBI. Non-NIH-funded manuscripts do not require PMCIDs, nor do book chapters, conference presentations, or other non-journal works.
  • Use ‘et al’ in lieu of listing all authors in a citation, especially if you are struggling to stay under five pages.
  • Bold your name in the citation.
  • A citation can be referenced multiple times in a single biosketch.

IMPORTANT - If you are citing an interim research product, which is a complete, public research product that is not final (preprints or preregistered protocols are examples), please review the NIH citation examples to verify you are citing the item correctly.

Are you familiar with the unique identifiers DOI, PMID, and PMCID?  

  • A DOI or digital object identifier is a unique alphanumeric string that identifies content and provides a persistent link to its location on the Internet. The publisher assigns a DOI when the article is published and made available electronically. If you have an output that it not published in a traditional journal, you can get a DOI assigned by uploading it to a repository like Prism, the institutional repository here at Feinberg.  
  • A PMID is also a unique identifier that is used in PubMed for each article. The PMID is assigned to each article record when it enters the PubMed system. An article will have a PMCID if it is an article that is associated with an NIH award, and has been deposited to PubMed Central.