Chemistry Literature Searching

The Cage-Match edition

for CHEM381 – 2011Week 1

Cage match! Chemical data

Fast Found:

Wikipedia – has general stuff – production, properties – links to references at the bottom

PDFs from chemistry sites (universities)

Risk assessment sheet and data from a chemistry department

List of suppliers from buyersguidechem.com, some have pricing

Slow to load Found:

Typed in name and brings up a page with picture, molecular weights, properties etc

Wikipedia article too Links to articles (some chemical,

some pharmacological) Commercial suppliers - Lots of

different suppliers with prices - Just a dropdown tab

Cage match! Chemical data

Search for ‘glycine’ found lots of medical supplements – not for use in lab! Have to filter through to get lab stuff.

Ended up on an ebay-type page – not sure how reliable it is.

Searching “amino acetic acid” more useful

Straightforward searching

Long list of suppliers with links to lots of them – gives you source numbers, “poly-glycine” so you still have to do some filtering

Information more concentrated

Chemical structure drawing

Last year we learnt…

How journals are run How to use Web of Science Databases

ChemSpider ChemSketch ChemGold Web of Science

ACS style bibliography and referencing

We still want to learn…

Where to find information Research – how to search on a specific topic Discussion with peers Finding articles by the same author Identify keywords

We’ll cover…

Week 1 ChemSpider (done! ) What the Literature is The Research Process Google Scholar SciFinder (part 1)

Week 2 SciFinder (part 2) Web of Science Other data sources (Prices, MSDS) Citing in ACS style

The Literature

You

The Research Process

Define your topic

What information do you need?

Who would have written about it? Where?

Find information

Judge it – is it reliable? relevant?

– does it point in new directions?

– is it enough? or do you still need more?

Analyse and synthesise

Cite all sources!

Where to start?

http://library.canterbury.ac.nz/chem

Cage match! The Literature

Just typed in phrase and got some articles

A few different articles about phytoremediation but couldn’t find all the keywords in one title – tried a broader search and found some related to plants

A link on certain papers saying “Full text at UC library” (on campus) – Library has access to certain databases

Also PDFs from other sites (eg institutional repository)

Unpleasant to search! Longwinded. Filters results before you get to the

list – comes up with how many references per word - so you can get results that are more relevant to what you want

Taken through three windows to get full text – popup windows, and no access to the ones tried.

So much comes up - not sure what to do next

“Full text” link but only 1/3 actually had full text

Cage match! The Literature

Finding author: Just list of first three authors under

title of each paper Advanced search to narrow by

author Can search by author but can’t see

a way to sort by author

Finding substances: Can only find substances by reading

the text...

Analyse function on right Get a list on the righthand side with

authors and number of titles

“Substance” link below each article lists structure, more references, supplier information, etc

Questions

Would like to explore things more next week

ScienceDirect only includes Elsevier-published material – but is it more than one/few journals?Yes, thousands of journals plus handbooks etc.

Register for SciFinder(See the video on the subject guide)

Find 1 article

Pick a question suggested by the article(You can change your question

later!)

Homework!

Slides and video

http://library.canterbury.ac.nz/chem

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