NCBI - Blast - how to cite - (Jul/26/2010 )

Hi folks,

for an application I want to write that for some sequence data we want to use NCBI's BLAST database/genbank...but how to write it or cite it?
Just NCBI/Blast (with web-url in the reference list) or the reference that is occurring after a Blast search:

Stephen F. Altschul, Thomas L. Madden, Alejandro A. Schäffer, Jinghui Zhang, Zheng Zhang, Webb Miller, and David J. Lipman (1997), "Gapped BLAST and PSI-BLAST: a new generation of protein database search programs", Nucleic Acids Res. 25:3389-3402.

Actually I'd add something to have it in the reference list, but I don't know if the URL is enough and did not find any hints on their website...
Thanks for any suggestions.

Yeah,

thats how we do it: we state that we blasted it with NCBI's BLAST (and in detail: wich query etc) and then we give the link.

The reference you get at the blast website, I would not give that.
People can look that up if you give them the blast information.

Anyway, maybe others have other ideas?

That's why that paper got more than 30,000 citations.

pcrman on Mon Jul 26 18:05:23 2010 said:

I've seen papers with the reference and others with just the web address. I think you can choose.

it also depends on the journal....some want a full citation and some just mentioning BLAST (at least this is what we experienced with our papers), might also depend on the reviewers

But for the BLAST algorithm it seems to be the same as with PCR, nobody cites the original paper anymore