For the CA database, several different types of primary documents are included (journal article, technical report, dissertations, patents, conference proceedings). With SciFinder Scholar, author searching of the CA File is now relatively straightforward.
Author searching, whether for individuals or corporations, is often easier than subject searching. Once the name is known, it is usually a matter of figuring out how the system you are searching labels the author field or corporate source field in order to limit the search to that index. Web systems will usually have a box labeled "author" which can be filled in.
The order of entry of a name, the punctuation, and on some databases, whether you must enter the name exactly as it is found in the file are some key points to learn before you attempt a search in an online database. For example, on the Indiana University Libraries Online Public Access Catalog, IUCAT, a search for books written or edited by Professor Ernest R. Davidson may be entered and searched as author keywords. Thus, entering:
Ernest R Davidson
results in the following:
In terms of printed works, author indexes are found in even the very old literature of chemistry. It is usual for a publisher to create an author index at the end of a journal volume or publishing year to allow easy access to the articles published in the journal. Some even compile indexes that cover a decade or more of the journal's publication, and those are sure to include an author index. An example is the Royal Society of London's Decennial Index, 1971-1980, which is an index of authors in their Proceedings, Philosophical Transactions, and Biographical Memoirs publications. ChemicalAbstracts Service also published collective five- or ten-year author indexes covering all volumes of Chemical Abstracts from its inception in 1907.
A bibliography at the end of an encyclopedia article is a good source of the key names in a given subject area if you are beginning research in a new field. Author indexes are found in abstracting and indexing journals, in bibliographies, review serials, and in many other secondary works. In some instances, it may be worthwhile to look for a company as an author. It will depend on the database how (or even if) the corporate name is indexed. For very common personal names, it is sometimes useful to combine a personal author name search with the corporate name of the company for which the author worked at the time of publication.
A particular type of searching that is related to author searching by personal name is CITATION SEARCHING. In this case, the references to a known author's work, as they appear in the bibliographies of new literature, would be used to identify that new literature. In other words, a citation index is created to provide a link between an older cited work which you know is on a topic of interest and newer citing works. The assumption is that the more recent articles would have cited the older work only if they were on the same topic.
For many years, the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) has published the Science Citation Index (SCI), with coverage in print format (and now also on the Web of Science) back to 1945. Printed SCI in its complete form is a multi-disciplinary index that covers the most important scientific and technical journals in the world (approximately 5,000 titles).
SCI covers the literature that was published from 1945 to the present and indexes it by author in the "Source Index" to SCI. Think of the Source Index as the author index for the literature that was new at the time the index was published. Since SCI includes the most important journals from all areas of science, it should be one of the first sources you turn to for a search for the publications of any scientist.
The really unique thing about SCI is that each volume also includes a "Citation Index" that in effect extends its coverage much farther back than 1945. Thus, even if an article were written in 1923, as long as someone had cited it in one of the journals covered by SCI after 1944, the bibliographic citation from the older article provides a link to the newer citing article(s).
There is also a subject index to SCI, which will be discussed in a later lecture.
The Cumulative editions of the printed Science Citation Index were published for the following years:
Source Permuterm Citation
Years Index Subject Index Index
1945-54 x x
1955-64 x x
1965-69 x x x
1970-74 x x x
1975-79 x x x
1980-84 x x x
1985-89 x x x
etc.
All of the information from the printed Science Citation Index is now found in the Web of Science.
It is rare in most disciplines of science today to find an article written by a single scientist. Thus, an article may have 3, 5, 10, or even more authors listed on the publication. The record is far in excess of 100 authors on a single article! For obvious reasons, abstracting and indexing journals usually limit the number of authors' names on a given article that will be included in their pinted author indexes, and SCI is no exception. The Source Index covers a maximum of nine authors. Such limitations are beginning to disappear in the computer environment. ISI now includes all authors in their Web of Science version of SCI, and Chemical Abstracts Service, which had a limit of ten through 1996, raised the limit to 150 from 1997 onward.
The problem with multiple authors on individual articles is that only one can be listed first. Consequently, the SCI Citation Index will use the first author listed as the point of entry into the Citation Index, EVEN if the first author is not the most prominent scientist listed on the paper (the principal author). This is a reasonable approach, since most people who encounter the publication in a bibliography would see it cited exactly as it appears in the journal itself. However, think about the problem this causes when you want to find out how many people have cited ALL of the publications co-authored by a given scientist. If over the course of a career, there had been instances when the scientist was not listed as the first author, it would mean you would have to use each of those individual references as a separate search key to find all articles that had cited the scientist's works. This is a very tedious task in the print SCI and was not much easier to do in the database until recently. Nevertheless, it is a task that is often desirable to perform for purposes of supporting promotion and tenure cases, identifying young researchers in a particular area of research, etc.
The Web version of SCI appeared in 1997 (also with coverage back to 1945 for the new source material). It is called the Web of Science. This version of the Science Citation Index includes abstracts for many of the articles, and from 1997, e-mail addresses of the authors. One of the most powerful features of the Web version is the capability to find citations to most of an author's journal publications even if the author was not listed as the first author on the publication. [The articles must have been published in one of the more than 5,700 journals covered by the Web of Science version of Science Citation Index.] Let's look at a search for articles that have cited a 1995 publication by Dr. David E. Clemmer to see how this works. The publication is:
Clemmer, D.E; Hudgins, R.R.; Jarrold, M.F. Naked protein conformations: Cytochrome c in the gas phase. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1995, 117, 10,141-10,142.
Step 1: Enter a Cited Reference search form with the minimal information--author, journal abbreviation, and year--and perform a "Lookup" to see if the work has been cited by anyone.
Step 2: Look at the refences found by the search, paying special attention to variant forms that are obvious typing errors. Note that the first and third Lookup candidates below have only one citation ("Hit") in a later journal article, but the fifth item on the list has 93. It is likely that a typing error was made in the volume number (147 instead of 117) and page numbers (1041 instead of 10141) when the entries were made. A further clue that these are errors is the fact that the article abstract is not hyperlinked to either citation, despite the fact that Dr. Clemmer is the first author and the Journal of the American Chemical Society is one of the journals covered by SCI in the Source Index.
Step 3: Choose newer article(s) of interest.
Step 4: Look at the full record in Web of Science, including the abstract.
Note the box in the upper right-hand corner above that is labeled "Related Records." These are records that have at least one cited reference in common with the document.
The online version of Science Citation Index is also available on both DIALOG and STN International where it is called SciSearch. See the sample STN SciSearch record.) The Related Records feature is also found on STN's SciSearch, where it can be searched as far back as 1974. There are now CD-ROM versions of the product, even with abstracts, and re-packaging of the database has resulted in subsets such as the Chemistry Citation Index on CD-ROM.
It is now possible to enter a search on STN's SciSearch (or on ISI's Web of Science, as seen in the above example) and do a fairly thorough job of finding all of the publications covered by SCI which have cited a given author's publications. On STN, this is done using the SELECT CIT feature as a bridge from databases where comprehensive author searching is allowed. We could perform an author search for the publications of Ernest R. Davidson in STN's CA file and find everything published by him since 1967 in an answer set L4, for example. The search algorithm for the SmartSELECT feature on STN will extract the relevant search keys from answer set L4 and run the search in SciSearch when the following commands are entered:
=> FILE SCISEARCH
=> S L4 < CIT>
[There is no space between the left angle bracket and the "CIT". Some
browsers show a space here.]
It is not possible to do this sort of comprehensive citation search for a single author with the CD-ROM versions of SCI. A search in the CD-ROM product for cited references is possible, but it will only take place on the author's name that is listed first on the publication itself.
Searches on the Corporate Source Index can be performed in SciSearch. For example on STN, the search statement:
=> S DOW FREEPORT/CS
will yield publications by the researchers at the Freeport location of The Dow Chemical Company.
A corporate search is also possible on the Web of Science, as shown below. A General Search includes an Address option where geographic place names and postal numbers, as well as words from the corporate name can be entered. In the example below, we are looking for all articles published by people in the Indiana University Department of Chemistry in Bloomington, Indiana (ZIP=47405), with the answers arranged by the title of the journals. Note the use of the same operator to keep all of the words in the same logical unit (sentence).
It is possible to search the printed Chemical Abstracts (CA) all the way back to 1907, and there are author indexes for the entire period. In fact, searching for authors is made easy by the five- and ten-year cumulative indexes for Chemical Abstracts.
To effectively use the printed author indexes to CA, you must know that the alphabetization of the names takes into account only the first letters of the given names (first and middle names) EVEN THOUGH the full name is listed in the indexes. Thus we find the following order of names in the index:
| Davidson, Eugene Abraham |
| Davidson, Ernest Roy |
| Davidson, Elizabeth West |
which is exactly the opposite of what would be expected if all letters of all parts of the names figured into the alphabetical sequence. There are many other rules for determining where names fall in the author index of Chemical Abstracts, and you can refer to the work itself for those.
CA includes in its coverage not only scientific and technical journals (over twice as many journal titles as does Science Citation Index throughout most of the period since World War II), it also covers dissertations, conference proceedings, reports, patents, technical reports, and other primary literature. In 1995 Chemical Abstracts Service began to include entries for electronic journal articles in CA.
A special type of author entry found in CA is for a PATENTEE, the person who has applied for and received a patent. CA also indexes the PATENT ASSIGNEE, normally the company the patentee works for. Patentees are not found in the Source Index of Science Citation Index since that product covers only primary journals, but patents account for about 1/6 of the documents added to the CA database each year. In the printed CA indexes, the letter "P" is inserted between the volume number and abstract number in the author index to designate that a document is a patent, e.g.,
Corporate bodies are also indexed in the CA author indexes. Bear in mind that companies which include a personal name will have the name inverted in the printed author index, e.g., "Lilly, Eli, and Co."
With the debut of SciFinder Scholar 2000, CAS introduced the "Company Name/Organization" search option. This is one of the main search options on the first screen of SciFinder Scholar, but it is also an option to refine a set of answers retrieved in some other manner of searching on the product.
The filing idiosyncrasies of the printed CA are usually not a problem in the STN or other versions of the CA database. With STN's SciFinder or SciFinder Scholar product, an algorithm finds likely candidates that match the search criteria (e.g., a misspelling of "Hieftje" as "Heiftje"). (However, it probably would not find a typing error such as, "Hleftje.")
A few years ago, Chemical Abstracts Service introduced citation searching into the SciFinder and SciFinder Scholar product line. In 2003, it was possible to find new articles published from 1997 to the present by refining a search using the "Citing References" option. For example, suppose you wanted to know what articles published 1997 or later had cited Dr. Gary M. Hieftje's 1994 publication:
Wu, Min; Madrid, Yolanda; Auxier, Jake A.; Hieftje, Gary M.. New spray chamber for use in flow-injection plasma emission spectrometry. Analytica Chimica Acta (1994), 286(2), 155-67. CODEN: ACACAM ISSN:0003-2670. CAN 120:234885 AN 1994:234885 CAPLUS
When you view the full record for that entry, the "Get Related" option leads to this screen:
The Beilstein database covers the literature of organic chemistry back to the 18th century. Thus, it is a useful adjunct to the Chemical Abstracts and Science Citation Index databases. However, the file was not really designed for author searching, so one must be careful to include names that might be the desired author even if only the last name was entered into the database.
Certain patent databases utilize codes for company names (patent assignee codes). For example, Derwent's World Patent Index assigns a code to about 21,000 companies worldwide that have 50 patents or more. The parent company, subsidiaries, and related companies are retrieved. For Hoffmann-La Roche, the code is 39424.
NLM's PubMed, a version of the Medline database, includes "Related Articles." Although not quite the same as a true citation search, the effect is similar.
Link to
supplemental readings
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Copyright
Gary Wiggins
15 September 1995