Chemistry Central Blog

Chemical information for the non-practitioner

Understanding how to effectively retrieve information from the chemical literature can be an arduous task even for the relatively experienced chemist. To the non-practitioner though, the minefield of indexing and abstracting services, substructure and reaction searches, unique identifiers, and chemical databases probably seems impenetrable.

Judith Currano, head of the chemsitry library at the University of Pennsylvania, gave a presentation in Philadelphia last month that aims to make some of the techniques involved in searching for chemical information more accessible to those without a chemistry background. The presentation is available online as slides and as a webcast, and covers the organisation of the chemical literature, providing some background on the various resources available – SciFinder, Reaxys, PubChem and Scopus, to name a few – outlining their coverage and capabilities. There are also plenty of real examples of how to retrieve certain kinds of information.

And while the coverage is far from exhaustive, it should also serve as a useful refresher for the practising chemist.

Posted by Bailey Fallon at 15:03    Comments (0)