Finding the NIH or PMC ID number

Finding your NIH or PubMed Central (PMC) ID number

When your manuscript is submitted to NIH, you will receive a NIHMS ID number during the submission process. After the manuscript is processed in PubMed Central, it will be assigned a PMC ID number.

Starting May 25, 2008, you will need to cite the PMC ID or NIHMS ID numbers for any of your articles which were accepted for publication on or after April 7, 2008 that you cite in your progress reports, new applications, and renewals. You may include PMC ID numbers for other articles already in PubMed Central as well.

You can search PubMed Central for the citations, and the PMC ID numbers will be listed. You may also find a PMC ID number in a PubMed record for an article.

To search PubMed Central, go to http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pmc.

If you need assistance with searching PubMed Central, please contact the John Crerar Library Reference Desk (2-7715, email: crerar-ref@lib.uchicago.edu).

The PMC ID number is a number used in PubMed Central, and should not be confused with the PMID in the regular PubMed database. For some articles, BOTH numbers may appear in PubMed (see the example below).

Any articles in PubMed Central that are not yet available for open access will have a release date ("Available after mm/dd/yy")clearly indicated in both PubMed and PubMed Central databases.