 Hi, my name is Alex, I'm a librarian at the University of Alabama, and today I'm going to talk about creating a PubMed NCBI account. Creating an NCBI account is highly recommended if you are doing any sort of serious research on PubMed. It allows you to use a number of PubMed features that would be otherwise unavailable. For example, you can use your account to save references, save and rerun searches, set up search alerts and more. Creating an account is free and relatively easy. To do so, follow these steps. Click on Login, choose Sign Up, create new NCBI account, and follow the directions. Now let's see what we can do with our account. We'll focus on saving references, saving searches, monitoring our search activity, and setting up search alerts. Let's take a look at the NCBI dashboard first. Here you'll see many of the features of an NCBI account. You can choose to customize your dashboard if you'd like. You can, for example, get rid of certain possibly unnecessary features by unchecking them. Now that we're back on the dashboard, let's look at a few of these categories. The first thing we'll look at is your bibliography. This is where you can save your PubMed references. To save an article or articles to your bibliography, just run a search, check the box next to each article you want to save, click Send To, and choose My Bibliography. You'll then see the results added to your list. Your recent activity allows you to look at searches that you've previously run. This is a good way of keeping track of what you've done before, especially if it's a research project that you come back to often on over time. You can also click on one of these searches to rerun them. The last thing that we'll look at in this video are saved searches. Your saved searches are those that you've set up a search alert on. You can only do this if you have an NCBI account. We'll run a search and set up an alert for it now. This is especially useful if you're working on a long-running research project and you want to know when new articles about a topic have been published. I'll click Create Alert to get things started. I can rename my alert if I want to, and from there it's just a matter of setting up your search alert. I do want to be notified via email, so I'll leave that alone. I will configure things how I want them and then click Save. Now I'll get an email once a month telling me if there are any new articles that meet these search parameters. There are more features available to you via your NCBI account, but hopefully that gives you a basic understanding of some of its most useful mechanics. We also have other PubMed tutorials available if you want to learn more, and don't forget, if you have a question, just ask a librarian.