SciFinder® Scholar Update: New Client and Historic Content Back to 1907 (Marion Peters, UCLA)

February 28, 2002 Author: CDLCategories:

SciFinder® Scholar 2001, released this Fall by CAS, is available for downloading from UCLA’s Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry Web site <http://dirac.chem.ucla.edu/scifind>. UC students, faculty, and staff need to install the SciFinder Scholar 2001 client (MS Windows or Apple Macintosh) or upgrade existing SciFinder Scholar 3.0 or 2000 clients. CAS will discontinue supporting SciFinder Scholar 3.0 on March 31, 2002.

Due to the release of SciFinder Scholar 2001, CAS will discontinue supporting SciFinder Scholar 3.0 on March 31, 2002.

The entire content of Chemical Abstracts (CA) back to 1907 is now available for searching with SciFinder Scholar. Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) began in 1999 adding material from pre-1967 CA issues to its online databases. The massive undertaking required converting to electronic form a huge volume of information that was previously available only in print. With the completion of this project, researchers can search this earlier literature using words in the abstract text and title, the publication title, author names, publication year, and more.

Among the pre-1967 scientific literature for which records are now accessible are many studies in fields other than chemistry, e.g., more than 100 papers by Enrico Fermi, winner of the 1938 Nobel Prize in physics; more than 50 articles by Albert Einstein; and definitive studies by E. B. Chain, H. W. Florey and Alexander Fleming, who shared the 1945 Nobel Prize for the discovery of penicillin.

With the addition of 3.8 million records from pre-1967 CA issues, the number of online records totals 20.5 million records, spanning 1907 to the present. About 789,000 of the earlier records are for patents, while 2,855,000 are for journal articles. The balance of records are for books, technical reports, conference proceedings, and dissertations.

CAS has also added to the chemical substance database content. Reaction information for organic substances now extends back to 1974 with more than 5 million single- and multi-step reactions. Some 5 million calculated properties have also been added to substances.

Please remember to logout after completing searches; ports are still limited and are shared among the UC campuses. SciFinder Scholar is available daily except 3 – 11 pm PST Saturday. Questions regarding SciFinder Scholar should be directed to campus contacts at: <
http://dirac.chem.ucla.edu/scifind/uccontacts.html>