Ren Zhang, Ph.D. assistant professor of Molecular Medicine and Genetics for the Wayne State University School of Medicine, has developed an online tool that facilitates the use of the new National Institutes of Health biosketch format. A description of the tool, mypub.org, will be published in the journal BioEssays.

Biosketches are required for all grants submissions to NIH as they contain essential information about an applicant's qualifications for any proposed project. A new biosketch format has been required required for all submissions since May 25 (NIH announcement: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-15-032.html).

"The new format is very different from the old one in many ways." Dr. Zhang said. "One notable change is that principal investigators are asked to describe contributions to science. Five contributions can be named, and only up to four publications can be listed for each contribution. So theoretically, the maximum number of publications that can be listed in the biosketch is 20."

A requirement of this format not seen previously is that listing all publications is not allowed; instead, investigators should provide a link to the publications in the My Bibliography, a reference-organizing feature of the PubMed in the National Center for Biotechnology Information environment. For example, the link for the NCBI My Bibliography of a principal investigator named Johnson is: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/myncbi/1rSSASw-9xn5A/bibilography/47758966/public/?sort=date&direction=descending.

"The regulation allowing only a link to all publications has some shortcomings that can potentially make it difficult for grant reviewers to check applicants' publication records," Dr. Zhang said. "The first problem is that the web address for the NCBI My Bibliography is too long. When the biosketch is viewed on a computer, it is OK because the reviewer can click the link. But in many cases, the biosketch is printed on paper. When the biosketch is viewed on paper, it is really not convenient, or not even practical, for the reviewer to type in the very long web address into the web browser."

The second problem, he said, is that the NCBI My Bibliography address is composed of, in many cases, meaningless characters. "In other words, it is not customized. So it is almost impossible for principal investigators to remember their own web address of the NCBI My Bibliography."

To address these issues, Dr. Zhang and his lab created a web server to shorten and customize the URL of the NCBI My Bibliography: mypub.org. Users can create a customized URL by registering for a user name, and the new URL will be represented as mypub.org/username. After login, users can input the URL for the NCBI My Bibliography (or other databases, such as Google Scholar). The above URL of Johnson, the example investigator, yields the new address mypub.org/johnson.

"The requirement of the new biosketch format affects grants submitted by many investigators here at Wayne State University and other universities. I hope this tool will make it more convenient to adopt the new biosketch format," Dr. Zhang said.

A correspondence titled "mypub.org, a customizable URL shortener for the NCBI My Bibliography," is scheduled to be published in the August issue of the journal BioEssays.