Chemical Abstracts & CAS REACT via SciFinder Scholar now available!

As announced in the CDL Alert on February 4th, UC students, faculty, and staff at all nine campuses can search Chemical Abstracts (1967- ), Registry (chemical structure searching), and CAS REACT from their personal workstations via SciFinder Scholar.  UCLA’s Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry is providing a Web site for access to SciFinder Scholar’s client software at [<http://dirac.chem.ucla.edu/scifind> ].

Access from valid UC IP addresses is almost 24 hours a day, 7 days a Week — the system is unavailable from 3pm (PST) Saturday to 5am (PST) Sunday for maintenance activities. Our agreement allows 18 simultaneous users to access these databases.  Users should logout when their search session is completed.  CAS’s SciFinder Scholar requires a downloaded client for either Apple Macintosh or MS Windows.  UC users have greeted SciFinder Scholar’s long-awaited arrival with enthusiastic comments.

“I downloaded SciFinder Scholar and I checked it out.  It works perfectly and complements nicely the Beilstein search engine.”
– Chemistry, Faculty, UCSD
“I tried SciFinder Scholar and found it is VERY useful.  Before we normally used INSPEC, which does not cover some chemistry journals.  Now, with SciFinder Scholar, these two systems will complement each other to cover full spectrum of the chemistry and chemical engineering field.”
– Chemical Engineering, Graduate Student, UCLA
“I am delighted to hear that UC is getting SciFinder Scholar.  This will be very important for our teaching and research efforts.”
– Chemistry, Faculty, UCI
“It’s too cool!”
– Chemistry, Faculty, UCLA
“Yesterday I downloaded the SciFinder Scholar system and found all my publications since 1967.”
– Chemistry, Faculty, UCSD

SciFinder Scholar’s client software provides simple point and click access to the CAS databases including Chemical Abstracts, Registry, and CAS REACT.  No special training or knowledge of search command languages are required.  Users may search more than 19 million citations to the chemistry literature by topic, author, CAS Registry Number, patent number, and CAS abstract number.  More than 22 million chemical substances may be searched by chemical name, chemical structure, CAS Registry Number, and formula.  Reaction information for organic and organometallic reactions from the CAS REACT database is included.

Additional details, including hardware and software requirements as well as search examples, are available from SciFinder Scholar via UCLA’s Web site at [ http://dirac.chem.ucla.edu/scifind ] CDL’s Resource Liaison for SciFinder Scholar is Marion Peters at UCLA.  She is working with CAS to link our electronic journal subscriptions and the California Periodicals database holdings to the SciFinder Scholar references.

Questions regarding SciFinder Scholar should be directed to campus contacts.  CAS will work with the campus contacts to set up training sessions.

SciFinder Scholar Campus Contacts:

UC Los Angeles
Marion Peters
CDL Resource Liaison for CAS/SciFinder Scholar
UCLA Science & Engineering Library
mpeters@library.ucla.edu
UC Berkeley
Mary Ann Mahoney
Chemistry Library
mmahoney@library.berkeley.edu
UC Davis
Carol La Russa
Physical Sciences & Engineering Library
cjlarussa@ucdavis.edu
UC Irvine
April Love
Science Library
mlove@uci.edu
UC Riverside
Julie Mason
Science Library
julie.mason@ucr.edu
UC Santa Barbara
Chuck Huber
Davidson Library
huber@library.ucsb.edu
UC Santa Cruz
Catherine Soehner
Science Library
soehner@cats.ucsc.edu
UC San Diego
Deborah Kegel
Science & Engineering Library
dkegel@ucsd.edu
UC San Francisco
David Owen
Library
owen@library.ucsf.edu