This session introduces another use of the A&I databases, current awareness, It also builds on our earlier acquaintance with reviews.
With the tremendous volume of primary chemical literature appearing each year, chemists need ways to become aware of new critical items they should be reading. The service that provides such assistance is called CURRENT AWARENESS. (These services are now often referred to as "alerting services.") Current awareness services automatically search on a frequent basis (usually weekly) the most recent entries in a database according to a search profile (strategy) that has been developed. For a broader look at less recent literature (perhaps one to two years old or older), REVIEW ARTICLES are often sought. These may cover hundreds of articles or other documents on the topic of the review. Finally, once the appropriate primary documents have been found, it may be necessary to use the services of a DOCUMENT DELIVERY SYSTEM, since it is likely that not all of the items needed will be found in the local library.
A. Commercial Options from Major A&I Services
ISI's Current Contents series is a weekly series of current awareness bulletins. These have author and subject indexes, and entries appear in the printed Current Contents shortly after the appearance of a covered primary journal issue. One advantage of these table-of-contents services is that more journals are included in them than are found in most libraries. A disadvantage, however, is that there may be a few weeks delay between the appearance of the primary journal issue and its entry into the secondary Current Contents issue.
Current Contents comes in the following printed and electronic science editions, with approximately 1000-1600 journal titles covered in each:
It is also possible to subscribe to a Web version of Current Contents, Current Contents Connect. With such a product, an interest profile consisting of subject words, authors' names, etc., can be run against each weekly update. CC is also available as a printed weekly booklet, on diskettes, CD-ROMs, or as FTP files. The CD-ROM versions actually have a rolling one year's worth of data. Output can be sent as a library service via e-mail if profiles are run from a central library location.
CC has the capability to output the references in a format that will feed into personal database software, such as EndNote or ProCite. An added feature is the option of getting conference proceedings that are published as books. (Many conference proceedings are published as regular or special issues of primary journals and, hence, would already be covered in the basic CCOD.)
Chemical Abstracts Service has a Table-of-Contents feature in SciFinder or SciFinder Scholar. Much of the bibliographic information that enters the CAS database is now received from the publishers in electronic format. With electronic versions of primary articles now appearing weeks or even months before the printed counterparts, it is important to be able to list those articles in the database when they become available.
B. UnCover REVEAL Service for Journal Article Current AwarenessOne can receive e-mail tables of contents of up to 50 journal titles from the ingenta (formerly, CARL UnCover) REVEAL service (not a free service). The ingenta database is not limited to science journals, and this creates a greater likelihood of obtaining output that is not really wanted (known as FALSE DROPS). Here is an example of the Reveal output. The service also allows up to 25 author or topic searches to be run weekly against new articles that have been added to the UnCover database in a given week. Since no additional indexing beyond the title words is added to the entries, they are available in the UnCover database very soon after publication, usually within a week of publication of the primary journal issue. Consequently, UnCover is one of the most up-to-date current awareness services in existence at this time.
C. Internet Journal Table-of-Contents Lists
Many publishers and others now put lists of the tables of contents of journals on the Internet. These are usually free to the user. See the list of chemistry electronic journals for some representative titles.
Elsevier's ContentsDirect is one example of a service offered by a major publisher to provide free tables of contents of their journals in advance of publication. With over 1400 journals currently available, there are sure to be some of interest to chemists. Elsevier also provides current awareness services on some hot topics such as the fullerene articles that appear in some of their journals. Here is an example of a fullerene output from Elsevier's CONTENTS-Alert service.
ACS offers a similar service for its 30+ journals, ASAP Alerts and Table of Contents Alerts. ASAP stands for "As Soon As Publishable," so when one of the articles enters the database, you are notified immeditately via e-mail that includes a link to the article. The ACS Table of Contents Alers is also an e-mail notification service, but it comes out only when the entire contents of a new issue is posted on the Web.
D. CA Selects/CA Selects Plus and Other Standard Interest ProfilesA STANDARD INTEREST PROFILE is a type of current awareness service that covers a topic of sufficiently general interest to make it profitable to spread the cost among a large number of subscribers to the printed product. The CA Selects/CA Selects Plus products are bi-weekly printed updates that contain the same abstracts found in the printed CA. American Chemical Society members who pay with their own funds receive a substantial discount. There are over 200 separate topics for which the CA Selects standard interest profiles are produced. CASelects Plus on the Web also has all of the topics available and offers many advantages over the printed counterparts, including a hyperlink to the new issue from e-mail notification and key-word searching of the issue.
Other database producers' products of this type can be found in the Index to Standard Interest Profiles in Science and Technology.
E. Custom SDI Service
Custom interest profiles (SDI or SELECTIVE DISSEMINATION OF INFORMATION) can be constructed to produce frequent computerized updates from the Chemical Abstracts or other databases. Since SDI is tailored to individual interests, the cost is high compared to other options. A profile can be constructed on most databases on search vendors' systems (for example, STN) with automatic updates sent to an e-mail address, if desired.
All of the sources in the previous section are aimed at making you aware of the existence of new primary literature as soon as possible after its publication. Sometimes, particularly at the start of a large research project, it is desirable to take a broader look at a subject, perhaps in one- or two-year periods of time. Review articles (or chapters) are written by experts in a field to make it easy to survey a large body of literature on a topic. The reviewers sift out the best literature, write a brief summary of the significant findings of the works, and give full bibliograpic references to the primary works. Thus, in a large field, a secondary review article may include hundreds of references in a single review article.
Review articles are sometimes published as special articles in primary journals, sometimes in conference proceedings. Most reviews are published in serial works that look like books, but often have titles that are clues to the review nature of their contents, for example, Annual Review of Biochemistry or Progress in the Chemistry of Organic Natural Products. They may also be published in journals whose purpose is to publish reviews, such as Chemical Reviews, a publication of the American Chemical Society, or Mass Spectrometry Reviews.
On SciFinder Scholar, one of the refine options allows you to select the document type "review". Each article that the author considers a review is so indexed in the CAPlus database. Likewise, in the Web of Science, one can limit the output to review articles.
A new concept in providing reviews seeks to cut down the time lag between the appearance of the new primary literature and its inclusion in a review. It is the Faculty of 1000 service. It is a literature awareness tool that highlights and reviews the most interesting papers published in the biological sciences, based on the recommendations of a faculty of well over 1000 selected leading researchers. These scientists provide a consensus map of the important papers and trends across biology and the life sciences.
The Index to Scientific Reviews, produced by the same company that publishes the Science Citation Index and Current Contents, has covered reviews since the early 1970s. A good source of reviews in organic chemistry is the series of treatises published by Pergamon Press. For example, Comprehensive Organometallic Chemistry includes in v. 9 of the work is an "Index of Review Articles and Specialist Texts on Organometallic Chemistry."A new service is BioMedNet Reviews, an archive of more than 5,000 full-text reviews from the series of journals entitled Trends in... and Current Opinion on....
For other leads to reviews, see "Finding Review Articles in Chemistry."
DOCUMENT DELIVERY is a term used in libraries to refer to the process of acquiring a copy of an item which your home library does not own and does not intend to buy in the original. Thus, it could mean INTERLIBRARY LOAN, the process whereby copies of books are borrowed through your library from other libraries or copies of articles are obtained from them. It more and more refers to the purchase of individual copies of the items to be given to the end user (perhaps at no charge or only a partial charge to the end user).
As electronic journals become widely available, the boundaries between secondary abstracting and indexing services and the primary journals are obscured. For example, in 1998, the STN ChemPort service began to provide access to full-text journals of key scientific publishers through STN Easy, STN Express, STN on the Web, SciFinder, and SciFinder Scholar. There are direct links from search results in CAplus, MEDLINE, EMBASE, BIOSIS, INSPEC, and other secondary scientific databases to the corresponding electronic full texts of primary journal articles and other documents at the publishers' sites. Some of the publishers offer access to single articles on a per-article sales basis.
There are now hyperlinks from the citations in the original articles of some journals to CAplus records. Conversely, CAS has started to add citations to the CAPlus records, thus allowing links among the CA records in the database, and from there through ChemPort to the original literature. Since the American Chemical Society has announced plans to put all of the articles in its journals on the Web by the end of 2001, this development provides an attractive link to a major portion of the significant chemical primary literature.
Publishers are always concerned about violations of their copyright on the articles in their journals. Developments in document delivery that libraries have pioneered under the Fair Use clause of the current Copyright Act have always been viewed with mistrust by publishers. The electronic age has served to widen the divide between librarians and publishers, since the latter now seek to license content to libraries rather than to sell it outright.
Here is a link to some document suppliers for various types of documents.
Link to
supplemental readings
Link to Internet
resources on this topic
Copyright 1998
Gary Wiggins