In SciFinder Scholar 2007, you can search the following:
- The Chemical Abstracts document database (CAPLUS). Documents from 1907 to the present (plus selected records pre-1906) have bibliographic information, abstracts, and full subject and substance indexing (by CAS Registry Number.) Total number of records: about 27 million as of Jan. 2008. Updated daily.
- The Chemical Abstracts substance file (REGISTRY). Substances indexed by Chemical Abstracts since 1957, plus substances from other sources (regulatory agencies, chemical catalogs, etc.) Includes Registry Numbers, chemical names, molecular formulas. Searchable structure diagrams are available for most simple comounds. Many proteins and nucleic acids have sequence information (displayble but not directly searchable in SFS). Many compound records have calculated and/or experimental chemical data for selected properties. In SFS, this information cannot be searched directly, but can be used to refine searches. Over 93 million records as of Feb. 2008 (33 million simple substances; 60 million biosequences).
- The Chemical Abstracts reaction file (CASREACT). Organic reactions from journal literature from 1907 to present, and patents from 1982 to present. Structure searchable for reactants and products, with reaction sites and atoms specifiable. Over 600,000 documents indexed, with some 14.5 million reactions as of Feb. 2008.
- The Chemical Abstracts chemical catalogs file (CHEMCATS). Information (including pricing) on over 19.1 million substances from over 900 suppliers' catalogs and chemical libraries. In SFS, information is linked to substance records and may not be searched directly.
- The Chemical Abstracts chemical regulatory database (CHEMLIST). Lists regulatory information from a host of national and international agencies on about 246,000 substances as of Feb. 2008. In SFS, information is linked to substance records and may not be directly searched.
- MEDLINE (PubMed). The National Library of Medicine's database may be searched simultaneously with the CAPLUS database in SFS. Over 16 million records from 1950 to present. Updated five times/week, with a complete annual reload to update subject headings.
"Explore" Options
In this lecture, we'll take a look at the Explore by Author and by Company Name options. Subsequent lectures will examine the other options.
Explore by Author
- In the electronic files, all author's names can be searched directly -- there's no need to deal with cross-references for co-authors.
- Note that in electronic CA, there is no attempt made to unify the versions of an author's name -- all are listed as they appear in the document - with or without full first name or initials.
- In SciFinder Scholar, enter the author's last name and initials, then
click on OK. Note the check box for searching for variant spellings.
- Select the author names you wish to search by clicking the box next to the name.
- For the next screen, I entered Peter C. Ford's name in the search boxes, and got:
- Now click on "Get References". The system will automatically retrieve an answer set corresponding to the names you have selected. Answers will be displayed most recently indexed first. If your answer set has more than 10,000 references, only the first 10,000 will be displayed. However, the full answer set may be Refined to get segments of the set.
Results Display in SciFinder Scholar
- The basic starting display is the bibliographic information for the items, including author/inventor names, document title, etc. Note that full journal names are displayed.
- Using the View menu, you can change the Sort order: the default is by Accession Number (most recently added to the database first), but you can sort by Title or Year and Title.
- You can also change the display option. Compact is the article title only, Standard is the full bibliographic information, Summary is the bibliographic information plus abstract (plus patent family information for patents), while Full includes all the information displayed in the full record below.
- You may select records of interest by clicking in the checkbox to the left of each record. Selecting can specify which records you wish to print, or download, or perform other operations on. The Keep option in the Tools menu lets you turn a set of selected records into a new answer set, which then can be viewed or manipulated like any other answer set.
- The microscope icon
is a link to the full record, including abstracts, subject headings, Registry Numbers and cited references (where available).
- Recent records may not have the full indexing. Some types of documents may not have abstracts (e.g., dissertations). Only records since the beginning of 1999 have cited references.
- Note the "hot link" on each Registry Number. This takes you to the SFS Registry record for the compound. In turn, from there, you can jump to documents referncing that compound, reactions containing the compound, regulatory data and commercial availability data, where available.
- Note how most of the citations are hotlinked. These links will take you to the SFS record for that article, with the ability to further link from there.
- Patent records (see below) include patent family data where available, and the patent classification codes (IPC codes for all patents, and US codes for US patents.)
- The text icon
is a link to the ChemPort system, which in the UC system uses UCe-Links to link to article full text (as well as other UCe-Links functionality, see below.)
ACS journals have links in their Cited References which can take you back to SciFinder records, and you can follow a chain of research.
Remove Duplicates
Since SciFinder Scholar searches, by default, both CAplus and MEDLINE, searches will frequently turn up the same record in both files. If you wish to remove these duplicate records, click the "Remove Duplicates" button. SciFinder Scholar will preferentially keep the CAplus record where there are duplicates.
Analyze/Refine/Categorize
- Analyze, Refine and Categorize are tools to let you home in on more specific information from a broader starting search. Click on the Analyze/Refine button at the bottom of a Results screen.
- Analyze lets you pick a field in the article and graphically display what the records contain in that field.
- Note the bar graph arrangement. Select one or more of the listed items and click Get References to obtain a subset of the original search.
- Analyzing by Author is a good way to find specific co-authors when doing an author search, or important authors in a field when doing a subject search.
- Analyzing by Subject lets you home in on a particular topic.
- Analyzing by Publication Year lets you track trends in research.
- Refine allows you to narrow a search by performing a second search on your existing answer set. It also provides the functions often called "Limit by..." in other database systems.
- Refining by Research Topic lets you do the equivalent of combining searches. Note that all the sophisticated options for topic searching (see next lecture) are not available when Refining.
- Refining by Publication Year is a good way to break up large answer sets for display.
- Refining by Database lets you separate CA records from MEDLINE records.
- The Categorize feature is closely related to the Analyze feature. Like Analyze, it extracts subject headings (index terms) and Registry Numbers from the answer set you've selected. It then groups the terms into categories that share common attributes, e.g., "Inorganic substances" or "Substances in property studies".
- By checking one of the categories, you can see a list of the individual subject terms or substances from your answer set that fell into that category, and select one of more of them to get the references that have those terms/substances.
- In the example above, I applied Categorize to the set of records for Peter C. Ford, and selected the category "Catalysis". The individual headings that fall into that category are displayed in ranked order on the right.
Get Related
- Get Related allows to locate documents or substances related to an answer set, a set of selected records or an individual record.
- Cited References creates a set of records of the references cited in the starting document(s). Note that this only applies to documents indexed in CA or MEDLINE, so citations to books and other non-journal, non-patent sources usually don't appear.
- Citing References collects documents which cite any of the documents in the starting set.
- Note that since CA only indexing cited references back to 1997 for journal articles, these two tools work with a (so far) fairly small fraction of the database. However, as more records are added in the present, and CAS is working backward to added citation data for previous years, the power of these functions grows.
- Answer sets created by either of these processes can be analyzed, refined or used to "get related" themselves.
- Substances creates a set of the substances indexed in the documents at hand, based on Registry Numbers. Sets of substances may be analyzed, refined or used to get references just like any other substance answer set (see lectures 13 and 14.) Note that the most recently indexed documents may not have Registry Number indexing yet, and documents prior to 1967 have algorithmically-added Registry Number indexing at the present time.
- Reactions displays single and multi-step reactions which have been indexed for that document. Note that this only applies to certain organic reactions from journals or patents.
- e-Science searches the Web for documents related to the original set of articles, using Google, ChemGuide or ChemIndustry. ChemGuide is a specialty search engine for chemistry related web sites, while ChemIndustry specialized in chemical industry sites.
- Note that your SciFinder Scholar session can time out while you are using e-Science, and that you are tying up one of the valuable UC SciFinder Scholar ports while you are doing so. It is probably best to just use these search engines independently of SciFinder Scholar.
Printing, Downloading
- Select the results you wish to print or download by clicking the Selection Box to the left of the answer(s).
- When you've selected all the desired records, click on the Print or Save As buttons. You can then select the format (Compact, Standard, Summary Full) to use in the print/download.
- Note that, at present, there is no e-mail option within SciFinder Scholar.
Combine Answer Sets
- To combine anser sets in SciFinder Scholar, you must have one or more saved answer sets. To save an answer set for combining, click on the "Save As" button at the top of the screen. Then, select the file type "SciFinder Saved Answers" from the drop down menu. (See below).
- SciFinder will display the search history for the answer set, and prompt you to give a title to the set.
- Once the answer set is saved, you can do a second search. Note how the "Combine Sets" icon at the top is now active. Click on it, then select the answer set you wish to combine with the current set and click "Open".
- Now, select the type of combination you wish to do: "Combine sets" (equivalent to Boolean OR), "Intersect sets" (equivalent to Boolean AND), "Remove saved set from current set" (equivalent to Boolean A NOT B), or "Remove current set from saved set" (equivalent to Boolean B NOT A).
- The resulting answer set will then display just like the answer set from a direct search.
- Note that you cannot directly combine more than two answer sets. To combine multiple sets, you would need to combine them in steps. For example, to do (A AND B) NOT (C OR D), you would first combine sets A and B, then save the result to get a set E. Then combine C OR D and save the resulting set F. Then combine E NOT F.
Explore By Company Name
- This feature is useful for exploring the research efforts of a given company, agency or academic institution.
- Below is a portion of the "Company name" analysis on an answer set obtained by searching "3M". A search of "Minnesota Mining" gave the exact same result. Note that the search has a degree of built-in "intelligence" and will find (at least in many cases") alternate forms of a company name. However, it cannot keep track of all mergers, acquisitions, spinoffs, and name changes.
- In the case of non-corporate institutions, there is frequently no attempt at cross-referencing. Compare the analysis of an answer set generated by searching "Santa Barbara" with that for "UCSB".
This page created by Chuck Huber (huber@library.ucsb.edu).
Updated: 02/11/08 12:35:59
