What is a PMCID?
Every submission to PubMed Central is assigned a PubMed Central Identification number or PMCID. This must be included for every paper that is cited in an NIH application, proposal or progress report if the paper arose in some part from NIH funds or is covered by the Open Access Policy. It can take up to six weeks to generate a PMCID from the time the article is submitted.
Find further information about how and when to cite using your PMCID here.
How to Add an Manuscript not Associated with your NIHMS Account
Two steps are necessary to claim a manuscript not currently associated with your National Institutes of Health Manuscript Submission (NIHMS) account.
First you must "watch" the submission. To monitor a submission in NIHMS, locate the record in the NIHMS system by either PMID or NIHMS ID using the 'search' function in your NIHMS account. On the resulting page for the manuscript, you can click on the button to 'watch manuscript' to request access to the record. This will send a notification of your request to the current reviewing author assigned to the manuscript. If the reviewing author does not object, you will be granted access in one week's time. Please note that to protect confidentiality, you will be asked to supply the manuscript title and journal information for records not yet matched to a PMID.
Request to claim the record once the watch request has been approved. If your account is not authorized to act as an author on the paper, NIHMS staff must verify that you are an author or Principal Investigator (PI).
For further information visit the NIH Manuscript Submission System FAQ.
Locating the PMCID
The PMCID number is posted in PubMed as soon as an article has been successfully processed by PubMed Central (PMC), which usually occurs around the time of publication. The easiest way to find and track PMCIDs is to add the paper to My NCBI (See My NCBI and My Bibliography training materials at http://publicaccess.nih.gov/communications.htm for instructions). My NCBI will automatically add the PMCID to a citation as soon as it is available.
PMCIDs are listed in the lower right corner of the Abstract Plus view of PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed). If the paper is successfully processed but not yet publicly available on PMC, PubMed will also list the date the paper will become available.
Other methods of obtaining PMCIDs can be found here.
