Our goal in BioCreAtIve has been to assess the state of the art in text mining, with emphasis on applications that reflect real biological applications, e.g., the curation process for model organism databases. This paper summarizes the BioCreAtIvE task 1B, the Normalized Gene List task, which was inspired by the gene list supplied for each curated paper in a model organism database. The task was to produce the correct list of unique gene identifiers for the genes and gene products mentioned in sets of abstracts from three model organisms (Yeast, Fly, and Mouse).