This guide walks through the actual mechanics of building a biosketch inside SciENcv (Science Experts Network Curriculum Vitae) — signing in, linking ORCID, entering the required sections, handling delegate access, and exporting a file that will actually pass NIH’s or NSF’s validation checks. It assumes you already know you need a biosketch and are looking at the tool itself. For what belongs in the NIH Biographical Sketch Common Form’s content sections, see the NIH biosketch worked example; for the NSF Biographical Sketch content, see the NSF biographical sketch worked example. For the ORCID-eRA Commons linking mechanics specifically, see how to link ORCID to SciENcv for NIH biosketches, which this guide summarizes but does not duplicate.
Last verified: August 16, 2026. NIH’s Common Forms requirement changed enforcement mechanics twice in the first half of 2026 — see the “why this changed recently” section below before treating any older SciENcv walkthrough you find elsewhere as current.
Why this changed recently: NIH’s Common Forms mandate
NIH replaced its narrative Sections A–D biosketch format (in use since 2015) with the NSPM-33 Common Form architecture that NSF had already been using since 2023, for applications, Just-in-Time submissions, Research Performance Progress Reports, and Prior Approval requests due on or after January 25, 2026 (NIH Guide Notice NOT-OD-26-018). The new NIH Biographical Sketch is now built in two parts: a Common Form (professional preparation, appointments and positions, products) and a separate NIH Biosketch Supplement (personal statement, honors, contributions to science). Both are produced in SciENcv, not a Word template.
NIH gave applicants a warning-only leniency period, extended once by NOT-OD-26-033 through May 7, 2026, before NOT-OD-26-079 switched eRA Commons validation from a warning to a hard error on May 8, 2026. Since that date, a non-compliant Common Form blocks submission outright rather than merely flagging it. That’s the practical reason most SciENcv walkthroughs published before 2026 are now showing an obsolete NIH form — the two-part structure, the ORCID-linkage requirement, and the malign-foreign-talent-recruitment-program certification described below did not exist in the pre-2026 version they document.
NSF has required SciENcv for its own Biographical Sketch and Current and Pending (Other) Support since October 23, 2023, with the current NSPM-33 Common Form version (v.2024-1) in effect for proposals due on or after May 20, 2024. NIH and NSF now share the same underlying six-section Common Form structure for the Biographical Sketch, but each agency wraps it in its own submission system, its own required certifications, and its own validation rules — which is why this guide covers both paths rather than assuming they work identically.
Before you start
Have these ready before opening SciENcv, since gathering them mid-session is the most common reason a first attempt takes much longer than it should:
- An ORCID iD. If you don’t have one, register at orcid.org/register first — see CASRAI’s guide to registering and searching for ORCID iDs if you need it. NIH requires the ORCID iD to be linked to your eRA Commons account and displayed in the Common Form’s Persistent Identifier field.
- Credentials for whichever federated login you’ll use. SciENcv retired direct NCBI username/password sign-in in June 2021 — you now sign in through a federated identity provider: eRA Commons (for NIH), your NSF Research.gov/NSF ID (for NSF), Login.gov, or an institutional single sign-on/other partner account.
- A rough list of your positions, education, and up to ten “products” (five most closely related to the proposed project, five other significant products) if you’re building an NIH or NSF Biographical Sketch. ORCID-linked records can pre-populate most of this, which is the main reason to link ORCID before you start rather than after.
- Know whether you’re the one submitting, or building on behalf of someone else. Grants and sponsored-programs staff frequently build biosketches for PIs and senior/key personnel; that requires delegate access, covered below, not the PI’s own login.
Step 1: Sign in and reach SciENcv
Go to SciENcv through NCBI (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sciencv) and choose a sign-in option. NIH applicants generally sign in with their eRA Commons account so the resulting profile links cleanly to that Commons ID; NSF-only users can sign in with their NSF (Research.gov) account. Login.gov, Google, and various institutional accounts are also accepted as federated identity providers. On first sign-in through a given provider, SciENcv will prompt you to either create a new My NCBI account or link the login to an existing one — link to an existing account if you’ve ever used My NCBI, My Bibliography, or SciENcv before, rather than creating a duplicate profile.
Step 2: Link your ORCID iD
From your SciENcv dashboard, link your ORCID iD (an “ORCID” or “Link an identifier” option appears on the account/profile settings). Once linked and authorized, SciENcv can pull employment, education, and (if you’ve connected them) publication data directly from your ORCID record, which is faster and less error-prone than typing every entry by hand. For NIH specifically, ORCID must be linked all the way through — to your eRA Commons account and displayed in the Common Form — not just linked to SciENcv in isolation; NIH’s own guidance on NOT-OD-26-079 flags “ORCID and eRA Commons each linked, but not both connected through SciENcv” as one of the most common validation failures. If your institution requires ORCID for senior/key personnel, see ORCID iD for NIH Senior/Key Personnel for the underlying policy. The full click-by-click linking sequence (eRA Commons Personal Profile plus My NCBI Linked Accounts) is documented separately in how to link ORCID to SciENcv for NIH biosketches.
Step 3: Connect My Bibliography (NIH biosketches)
If you’re building an NIH document, connect your My Bibliography collection under your NCBI account before starting the biosketch. My Bibliography is NCBI’s citation-management tool; once populated (manually, via a PMID/DOI search, or by importing from your ORCID record), SciENcv can pull directly from it when you build the Products section of the Common Form, instead of you re-typing citations. This step is optional for NSF documents, which draw more heavily on the ORCID-linked record.
Step 4: Start a new document and choose the correct type
From the SciENcv dashboard, start a new document and select the right type for your agency and purpose:
- NIH Biographical Sketch — the Common Form itself (Professional Preparation, Appointments and Positions, Products, Certification).
- NIH Biosketch Supplement — the separate Part 2 document (Personal Statement, Honors, Contributions to Science) required alongside the Common Form for due dates on or after January 25, 2026.
- NIH Current and Pending (Other) Support — a different document type, not the biosketch; see CASRAI’s Current and Pending Support definition and the NIH Other Support template guide if that’s what you actually need.
- NSF Biographical Sketch — the NSF-formatted Common Form output.
Picking the wrong document type is a common early mistake because several of these share the same underlying six-section Common Form structure and look similar in the SciENcv list view — check the label NSF or NIH assigns before you invest time filling one in.
Step 5: Fill in the Common Form sections
Both the NIH and NSF Biographical Sketch use the same NSPM-33 Common Form skeleton: Identifying Information, Organization and Location, Professional Preparation, Appointments and Positions, Products, and Certification. For the exact field-by-field requirements of each NIH section, see CASRAI’s NIH Biosketch Common Form field-by-field guide. Fields you linked via ORCID or My Bibliography can usually be pulled in with an import action rather than typed manually — review every imported entry rather than trusting it blindly, since ORCID records commonly contain formatting inconsistencies or entries you don’t want on this particular document. There is no page limit on the Common Form the way the old narrative format had a five-page cap; instead, individual fields carry their own character or entry limits (for example, up to five products “most closely related to the proposed project” plus up to five “other significant products” on the NIH form). For NIH, complete the separate Biosketch Supplement document (personal statement, honors, contributions to science) alongside the Common Form — they are exported and uploaded as two distinct files, not one.
NSF users: Synergistic Activities is not part of the Biographical Sketch as of the v.2024-1 format (effective for proposals due on/after May 20, 2024) — it moved to its own separate one-page document that is not generated in SciENcv and must be uploaded independently. See NSF Synergistic Activities: requirements, format, and how it changed. Collaborators and Other Affiliations (COA) is also not built in SciENcv for NSF; it uses NSF’s required spreadsheet template, covered in the NSF COA template guide.
Step 6: Assign delegate access (building a biosketch for someone else)
Grants staff who prepare biosketches on behalf of a PI or senior/key personnel need delegate access rather than the person’s own login credentials. The account owner grants this, not the delegate:
- The document owner signs in to My NCBI, opens Account Settings from the username menu in the top right, and finds the Delegates section.
- They select “Add a delegate” and enter the delegate’s email address.
- They choose what the delegate can access: a “My Bibliography” checkbox grants view/edit access to that collection, and a separate “SciENcv” checkbox grants the ability to create, view, and change SciENcv documents. Grant only what the delegate actually needs to do the work.
- The delegate receives an email invitation (from an NCBI address — check spam if it doesn’t arrive) and must follow the link to accept before access becomes active.
Once accepted, the delegate can build and edit documents inside the owner’s account, but the final certification and export step (below) is typically still confirmed by whoever is authorized to certify the document’s accuracy — check your institution’s own sign-off convention, since SciENcv’s delegate permission and your institution’s certification-of-accuracy policy are two different things.
Step 7: Certify and export the PDF
When the document is complete, use the export/download action. SciENcv presents a certification prompt before generating the file — the certification must be completed for the document to export as a usable, compliant PDF. Two things matter here more than they look like they should:
- Don’t rename-and-reopen the exported PDF in another application, or re-save it. The PDF SciENcv generates carries embedded metadata that NIH’s eRA system and NSF’s Research.gov/Grants.gov validate on upload; opening the file in a different PDF editor and re-saving it, even without changing visible content, can strip or alter that metadata and cause the upload to be rejected. Renaming the file itself is fine.
- Export a fresh copy close to submission time, not weeks in advance from an old session. NIH’s own guidance on the May 2026 validation change specifically flags a stale export — a PDF generated in an earlier SciENcv session that’s missing required metadata despite looking visually complete — as one of the most common causes of a rejected upload.
Upload the resulting PDF to the correct field in your submission system: eRA ASSIST/Commons for NIH, or Research.gov/Grants.gov for NSF, matching the exact document type (Biographical Sketch vs. Biosketch Supplement vs. Current and Pending Support) to the field it belongs in.
NIH vs. NSF: where the SciENcv workflow diverges
| Step | NIH | NSF |
|---|---|---|
| Sign-in identity | eRA Commons account (recommended) | NSF/Research.gov account (recommended) |
| Documents produced | Biographical Sketch (Common Form) and a separate Biosketch Supplement | Biographical Sketch only (single document) |
| ORCID requirement | Required; must be linked through to eRA Commons and shown in the Persistent Identifier field | Strongly encouraged, not currently a hard submission block |
| Certification content | Includes a malign foreign talent recruitment program certification | Standard accuracy certification |
| Adjacent documents also built via SciENcv | Current and Pending (Other) Support | Current and Pending (Other) Support only — Synergistic Activities and Collaborators & Other Affiliations are built and uploaded separately, outside SciENcv |
| Upload destination | eRA ASSIST / eRA Commons | Research.gov or Grants.gov |
| Governing enforcement date | Hard error validation since May 8, 2026 (NOT-OD-26-079) | Mandatory since October 23, 2023; current format version since May 20, 2024 |
Troubleshooting: why a SciENcv export gets rejected
Per NIH’s own guidance accompanying the May 2026 enforcement change, three causes account for most rejected NIH submissions:
- ORCID not linked to eRA Commons at all. Fix in eRA Commons under your Personal Profile, then confirm the link is also reflected in SciENcv/My NCBI.
- ORCID and eRA Commons are each linked, but not connected to each other through SciENcv. Having both accounts individually linked to SciENcv isn’t the same as SciENcv recognizing the ORCID-eRA Commons pairing — re-check the Persistent Identifier field on the exported Common Form shows your ORCID iD.
- A stale exported PDF. Re-export close to submission rather than reusing a file generated in an earlier session, and never re-save an exported PDF in another application (see Step 7).
If a document simply won’t populate from ORCID as expected, check that the ORCID record itself is public (or at least visible to trusted parties) for the fields you’re trying to import — a private ORCID visibility setting on a work or affiliation entry will block SciENcv from pulling it in even when the accounts are correctly linked.
Frequently asked questions
What is SciENcv used for?
SciENcv is the NIH/NCBI-hosted tool researchers use to generate the standardized Common Form documents federal funders now require — principally the Biographical Sketch (biosketch) and Current and Pending (Other) Support statement — for NIH and NSF, and increasingly other federal agencies that have adopted the same NSPM-33 Common Form templates.
Do I need a separate SciENcv document for NIH and NSF?
Yes. Even though both agencies’ Biographical Sketch documents share the same underlying Common Form structure, you select the document type (NIH Biographical Sketch vs. NSF Biographical Sketch) when you start each one in SciENcv, and each produces its own agency-formatted export. A document built for one agency isn’t automatically valid for the other.
Does SciENcv require an ORCID iD?
NIH effectively requires it: your ORCID iD must be linked to your eRA Commons account and appear in the Common Form’s Persistent Identifier field for submissions due on or after January 25, 2026, and eRA Commons has enforced this as a hard validation error since May 8, 2026. NSF strongly encourages an ORCID iD for Senior Personnel and it speeds up populating the form, but NSF has not implemented an equivalent hard submission block as of mid-2026.
Can someone else build my biosketch for me in SciENcv?
Yes, through the delegate feature described in Step 6 — the account owner grants a named delegate SciENcv and/or My Bibliography access from their My NCBI Account Settings, and the delegate can then build and edit documents inside that account. Ultimate certification of accuracy typically still rests with the account owner or your institution’s authorized signer.
Why does my exported PDF get rejected on upload?
The most common causes are an ORCID iD that isn’t fully linked through eRA Commons, an export generated in an earlier session that’s now missing required metadata, or a PDF that was reopened and re-saved in a different application after SciENcv generated it. See the troubleshooting section above.
Is the old NIH biosketch format (Sections A–D) still accepted?
No, not for applications, Just-in-Time submissions, RPPRs, or Prior Approval requests due on or after January 25, 2026 — the two-part NIH Biographical Sketch Common Form plus Biosketch Supplement, built in SciENcv, replaced it, with hard-error validation in effect since May 8, 2026.
For the full policy background behind this change, see CASRAI’s Biosketch (NIH-style) and NSF Biosketch (SciENcv) dictionary entries, and the news analysis on NIH’s Common Forms enforcement, May 2026. For the broader proposal-assembly context, see the grants management pillar and how to apply for an NSF grant.
