New SciFinder® Scholar Client Provides Search Enhancements (Marion Peters, UCLA

January 24, 2001 Author: CDLCategories:

SciFinder® Scholar 2000, released Fall 2000 by Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), offers UC users several search enhancements. Scholar2000 adds access to 11 million records from OLDMEDLINE and MEDLINE for searching in conjunction with the 16 million Chemical Abstracts CAplus (1967- ) records previously available. Two new search options include searches by company name including name variations and searches by functional groups in reactions. For articles published from 1999 forward, answer sets include hyperlinks from journal article references to corresponding CAplus or MEDLINE records. Full text for these references which display a computer icon are also retrievable from CAS’s ChemPort connection.

To access these new features, UC students, faculty, and staff need to install the SciFinder Scholar 2000 client (MS Windows or Apple Macintosh) or upgrade existing SciFinder Scholar 3.0 clients. Both the SciFinder Scholar 2000 client and the upgrade for existing clients are available for downloading from UCLA’s Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry Web site: <http://dirac.chem.ucla.edu/scifind>.

The California Digital Library recently completed SciFinder Scholar renegotiations with CAS for a slight increase in ports for 2001. Users are reminded to logout after completing their searches since ports are still limited and shared among the UC campuses. SciFinder Scholar is accessible nearly 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The system is unavailable from 3 p.m. (PST) on Saturdays to 5 a.m. (PST) Sundays. SciFinder Scholar complements other CDL-hosted databases such as BIOSIS Previews, Current Contents, INSPEC, MEDLINE, and Web of Science, available through CDL’s Web site. Questions regarding SciFinder Scholar should be directed to campus contacts (a list of contacts is available at: <http://dirac.chem.ucla.edu/scifind/uccontacts.html>).