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NCBI’s PubMed is essential to the biomedical researcher, and luckily, NCBI offers many interesting ways to increase productivity, especially through MyNCBI.
MyNCBI is a service that allows personalization of NCBI resources to aid your research, saving you time and hassle. Some of the ways you can use it include:
1. Save your search queries
Do you find yourself doing the same PubMed searches every two weeks or monthly? Do you have some complex search queries that take a long time to enter? With MyNCBI, you can save your common search queries for all NCBI databases. This includes PubMed, PubMedCentral (PMC), Genome, Protein, Nucleotide, and many more.

When logged into MyNCBI, the words “Save Search” appear after you’ve done a query.

After clicking the link, a pop-up appears, letting you give your search a name:

You can access your saved searches from your MyNCBI page, which you can get to by clicking the “MyNCBI” link at the top right of any PubMed web page.
The popup also lets you choose to receive email updates to your search, which leads us to Tip #2.
2. Email the results of your saved queries
Save even more time in your searching by having NCBI send you regular updates to your most useful searches. New results of your saved queries can be sent to you by email daily, weekly, or monthly. You can even specify which day of the week you want to receive the results. This is a great way to keep up with topics without constantly reading journal table of contents.

You can modify these settings later by going to your MyNCBI settings page, which you can get to by clicking the “MyNCBI” link at the top right of any PubMed web page.

3. Save collections of results for later reference

Do you find yourself searching PubMed at home or at the library, but would like to use the results on your primary work machine? MyNCBI Collections can help.

When you get results from your queries, add selected items to the Clipboard, then you can save groups of items from your Clipboard as Collections, as part of your MyNCBI account. These collections are then available anywhere you login to MyNCBI, by clicking the link at the top right of any PubMed page. This feature make the very temporary Clipboard storage much more powerful.
Here’s a brief illustration (click each thumbnail for a screenshot):

1. After searching, send a subset of results to the clipboard:
2. From the Clipboard, send a set of items to MyNCBI Collections:
3. Give the collections a useful name
4. And you have a new Collection that can be viewed or exported later, anywhere on the internet:

4. Enable custom filters in PubMed with Filters
When researching a new topic, I am often looking for review articles and articles that are either Free Full Text or at my university’s library. With my customized MyNCBI Filters, articles that are reviews, free full text, or at my library are separated out into “tabs”. This can make it much easier to zero in on exactly what I am looking for, especially when under a time crunch.

You can select up to 5 filters for each MyNCBI service, and these can be enabled and configured from your MyNCBI settings page.
5. Add links to your library’s licensed online journals.
Enables the use of the your libraries electronic resources, directly from a PubMed abstract page. For instance, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, this allows you to:

• locate an online full-text version of the article (if available)
• Check for this item in the library catalog
• Request a copy from other libraries, if not at UW

All this is done automatically, so you don’t have to type in volume numbers, journal titles, etc. This is particularly useful when you are traveling or working off-campus, where you would otherwise not have access to your university library’s resources.
To set this up:

• Go to your MyNCBI settings page by clicking the MyNCBI link at the upper right of any PubMed page
  
• Choose the “Outside Tool” link from the left sidebar of your MyNCBI page
• Select your library’s name from the long list of choices that appears.

Then, an icon for your libary should show up on any abstract page. Here is the one for University of Wisconsin:

Well, I hope I have revealed a bit of the power that you can access by registering for and using MyNCBI. I focused on PubMed, but any NCBI resource can be personalized using MyNCBI. Good luck!