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Chemical Literature (Chem 184/284)

Lecture 1: Overview of the Organization of Information

Because the subject is HUGE...
For example: Chemical Abstracts
- Indexes 14,000 journal titles, plus patents, conferences, reports, dissertations, etc.
- Adds over 700,000 citations and 700,000 substance records per year.
- From 1907 to present, about 19 million abstracts and 22.5 million substances indexed
In many areas of chemistry, notably synthesis, the older literature is as relevant as the newest literature.
Because the subject is COMPLEX...
Chemists are interested in information which cannot be readily defined merely by key words, such as ranges of numeric data or sets of substances with particular structural features.
Because the tools available for chemists are RAPIDLY EVOLVING...
Only a few years ago, there was very little on the Internet of interest to chemists. Now, traditional journals and databases have been reinvented for the World Wide Web, and new resources have sprung up.

Information can be treated as a thermodynamic system, subject to entropy (described by Claude Shannon)
The organization of raw data turns it into information -- the better organized, the more value added.
Organization can be added at many levels...including the ultimate user.

End-user information processing puts the information in its final form for use. A new task each time -- stoichiometric
Information professionals try to create organization in ways that can be used by many people -- catalytic

PRIMARY -- The original publication of data: journals, patents, technical reports conferences, dissertations, some books.
SECONDARY -- Publications which provide access to the primary literature: reviews, indexes, abstracts, data collections, etc.

Classification and Data Collection -- physically grouping related data by some common element.
Indexing -- creating pointers to the original literature based on some piece of information in the original, e.g. author names or subject terms.

Libraries use classification schemes to group related books together for browsing by subject. In the Library of Congress system, chemistry materials fall under QD.
Data collections bring information from various primary sources for easier location, e.g. the CRC handbook series.

Some indexes use keywords from the original; others use standard subject vocabularies.
In US libraries, terms are assigned from the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH).
MEDLINE uses the Medical Subject Headings (MESH).
Chemical Abstracts uses its Index Guide.

All information organization and retrieval involves tradeoffs
- Specificity vs. collation
- Relevance vs. recall
- Maximum precision vs. maximum quantity
Specific headings avoid the irrelevant
General headings bring like items together.
Searching narrowly avoids having to look at irrelevant items at the cost of missing some relevant material.
Searching broadly helps insure that nothing is missed, but may require later screening to eliminate irrelevancies.

The information user brings a perceived need or needs. Sometimes the information professional can help define what is really needed.
The information professional can suggest how best to meet the needs of the user with the available technology.
The information user has to set priorities based on the ultimate objective and the time, labor and money available for searching.
Together, they evolve the strategy needed for extracting needed information from the universe of scientific publication.
In this course, you will learn about specific tools and how to use them, and also how to generally develop a strategy for finding scientific information.

Comprehensive subject searches can be tough.
Start with what you know -- a subject term, an author, a known reference...
Decide which tools can best find answers based on your initial information.
Find an initial set of answers, and select the most relevant ones.
Review those answers for new clues -- terms, authors, cited references, citing references.
From these, repeat the cycle until satisfied.

Assume that you've just read the following article:

Let's say you find this article fascinating.

How might you build on the information contained here to find additional relevant information?

This page created by Chuck Huber (huber@library.ucsb.edu). Last modified: January 9, 2000.