Most of you may know about CamSoft's ChemFinder by now. This is an example of a good Web guide that is produced by a reliable company that carefully selects the Web sources to index via ChemFinder. Other Web guides and guides to printed literature are introduced in this lesson. You will also get another look at SciFinder Scholar in the exercise for this lesson. We encourage you to download SciFinder Scholar to your own computers.
Works that help you decide what secondary or primary tools to use or works that actually help you to use those tools are referred to as GUIDES, sometimes called TERTIARY tools. These may help:
Guides are found as printed books, directories of databases, directories of resources on the Internet, "how-to" manuals that accompany software or databases, and in several other formats, including online help files.
A particular type of guide is the DATABASE SUMMARY SHEETS provided by the VENDORS of online databases. Vendors are commercial entities that lease database content from DATABASE PRODUCERS and sell access to those files over public or restricted-access communication lines. The vendor Dialog Information Services makes available their "bluesheet" database summary sheets as file 415 on the service itself and on the Internet. STN's database summary sheets are also available as Internet WWW files. Look at the database summary sheets for the LCA (Chemical Abstracts Learning File on STN) and LREG (Chemical Abstracts chemical dictionary learning file on STN). Note the different search and display possibilities that are possible with these files and how the summary sheets help you to select the right way to enter the search if you were using the native command language of the STN system. In C471, you won't have to know anything about the STN command language because the SciFinder Scholar 2000 product does much of that work for you behind the scenes.
It is important to note that the same database may be available on several different vendors' systems, sometimes with different components of the database or different time periods available. For example, STN International offers the most data for the Chemical Abstracts database in its CA, Registry, and other files. These provide the text of the abstracts, the drawings of the chemical structures, enhanced indexing, and the capability to use the chemical structure as a search key. (Note that the Chemical Abstracts database on DIALOG is called CA SEARCH). Even a single vendor may offer multiple access points to certain databases, some designed for experienced searchers and others, for novices.
Designed to serve the chemical information needs of undergraduate students, CA Student Edition contains references from January 1, 1967 to the present from the Chemical Abstracts database. Included are references and abstracts from a select list of a few hundred journals and review serials, as well as over 200,000 chemistry dissertations. The list of journals covered in CA Student Edition can be seen at: http://www.cas.org/New1/selist.html. Searches may be performed by author names, subject words (including chemical substance names), and CAS Registry Numbers, as well as other search strategies. No structure searching is possible in the database.
There are comprehensive printed directories of commercially available databases and an ever-increasing number of guides to free resources on the Internet. A large number of the latter have been collected at the Argus Clearinghouse, but many people have compiled other guides to chemistry resources on the Internet.
Another approach to selecting a database is to let the commercial vendor's search system analyze which databases among their offerings have information relevant to your search. Dialog Information's DIALINDEX identifies which DIALOG files have information on a given topic; INFODEX is an online index to the contents of more than 30 databases on the Chemical Information System. The corresponding type of search on STN would be done with the STNindex feature. The STNGuide file is a database of STN Summary Sheets. It can assist in selecting the proper database to search. Here is a search on STNGUIDE to identify databases that have information on organometallic compounds. The results give brief descriptions of the databases.
We have prepared a list of printed guides in science, technology, and medicine. Remember that databases have been around only a few decades, whereas, the printed archive of chemical knowledge extends over several centuries. Much of the printed literature of chemistry will probably never be available on the Web.
There is an increasing amount of chemical information available on the Internet. A powerful guide to chemical data, including structures, on the Web is ChemFinder from CambridgeSoft. In addition to linking chemical substances to Web pages on the Internet, ChemFinder is also a handbook with reliable chemical data for many compounds.
A searchable guide to both printed and computer-based reference tools is the Chemistry Reference Sources Database (CRSD).
A SEARCH STRATEGY is a map of a course of action that ought to result in finding an answer to a chemical information problem using library, free Internet, and/or commercial database resources. It involves such tasks as:
For the third step, the works in this session will help you make appropriate choices.
Link to
supplemental readings
Link to Internet
resources on this topic
Copyright
Gary Wiggins
24 August 1997