PubMed, ORCID and Making Your Work Findable

PubMed is a free search tool that lists biomedical citations, and ORCID is a free identifier that ties your name to your work. Setting both up takes less than an hour, and it makes it easier for a program or reviewer to find and verify what you have published.

How PubMed works at a basic level #

PubMed holds more than 40 million citations and abstracts of biomedical literature. It does not hold full text, but it links to full text elsewhere. Its main components, per its own About page:

• MEDLINE, the largest part, made up mainly of citations from journals selected for MEDLINE, indexed with MeSH subject terms.
• PubMed Central (PMC), a full-text archive of selected journal articles.
• Bookshelf, citations for books and some chapters.

Publishers can send citation data directly, so records can appear before MEDLINE indexing is complete. PubMed's help notes that some citations, such as preprints and online-ahead-of-print records, are not MEDLINE-indexed and so may be missed by filters. It gives no fixed timeline for processing.

Check that your work is findable #

1. Go to pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov and paste the article title in the search box.
2. Search your name as last name plus initials without punctuation, for example smith ja. Including a middle initial limits results to articles that used it. Use the [au] tag for last name only.
3. If you cannot find it, try the Single Citation Matcher with journal, volume or page details.
4. Note the PMID, the number in the record's address. MyERAS has an optional PMID field for published journal articles and abstracts.

If a paper is accepted but not yet online, say so. MyERAS has separate statuses for submitted, accepted/in-press and published, and you must label them honestly (ERAS experiences section).

Create an ORCID iD #

ORCID is a nonprofit identifier registry. Its Researcher FAQ says anyone who participates in research, scholarship or innovation can register an iD free of charge. The iD stays the same if your name or institution changes. I could not open ORCID's step-by-step help pages, so the steps below follow the registration flow described by ORCID and may change:

1. Go to orcid.org/register and enter your name, an email address and a password.
2. Choose the visibility for your record. ORCID has per-item visibility settings (Everyone, trusted parties or only you), and only works visible to Everyone can be featured, so decide what you want visible.
3. Confirm your email.
4. Open Works and use Add to import from services, add by DOI or PubMed ID, upload a BibTeX file or enter manually. ORCID recommends importing over typing by hand to reduce errors.
5. Use the same email you use for journal submissions, and add your iD to manuscripts when asked.

A public ORCID page gives programs one link that lists your work, but it is not a credential. Keep it consistent with your ERAS entries.

NCBI My Bibliography #

My NCBI is NCBI's free account system. According to NCBI's My Bibliography help:

1. Sign in to My NCBI and open My Bibliography.
2. Use Add citations to search PubMed and select your papers, import from ORCID, upload a MEDLINE or RIS file, or enter an item manually using a template for work not in PubMed.
3. In your account's Linked Account area, you can add ORCID credentials so My Bibliography can retrieve citations from ORCID.
4. Set the bibliography to Public if you want a shareable URL.

NCBI's help pages I could reach are several years old and menu labels may have changed, so follow the on-screen options.

Name disambiguation: practical steps #

Names transliterated from other scripts, shared surnames and multiple initials cause missing credit.

• Pick one form of your name for all manuscripts, using the same spelling, initials and order, and keep it consistent with your ERAS and ECFMG records. See name and document issues.
• Register an ORCID iD and ask co-authors to add it at submission.
• Use your institutional email on papers where you can, so it is clear who you are.
• Search PubMed by [auid] if you have an author identifier tag, and use initials without punctuation.
• Format your ERAS authors field as MyERAS directs: last name plus initials, in publication order, with your own name in bold, for example Smith CB. The 2027 guide gives that format.

What MyERAS asks for #

For the 2027 season, the Publications section was redesigned and renamed Scholarly Work. The guide lists peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters and journal abstracts, plus oral and poster presentations. You enter the title, journal name, authors in order, whether you were first author, and a status with dates. For published work, PMID and URL are optional. You can group related work and star up to three as most meaningful. I did not find an ORCID field in the guide, so confirm in the current MyERAS worksheet. See how programs view research and authorship and author order.