Background: Named entity recognition (NER) is an important first step for text mining the biomedical literature. Evaluating the performance of biomedical NER systems is impossible without a standardized test corpus. The annotation of such a corpus for gene/protein name NER is a difficult process due to the complexity of gene/protein names. We describe the construction and annotation of GENETAG, a corpus of 20K MEDLINE ® sentences for gene/protein NER. 15K GENETAG sentences were used for the BioCreAtIvE Task 1A Competition.