Preface

“The literature of chemistry is like a great, inspiring mountain with a core of rich ore … in its use one must learn how to climb this mountain and must know where and how to dig for the ore ….”¹ 

Chemical Information for Chemists: A Primer is written for students, scientists, and information professionals who will benefit from learning the tactics of finding chemical information. Although the title implies that the book is intended for chemists, we hope that all scientists who use or study chemicals will find it essential in developing an effective and productive approach to searching the complicated literature.

The structure of the book roughly follows the syllabus of a graduate-level course in chemical information offered at the University of Pennsylvania, beginning with the structure of the chemical literature and its use in the broader chemical research process and proceeding through various types of source and methods of using each effectively and efficiently. It is designed to be used either in a stepwise progression or as a collection of comprehensive reviews of specific topics and is roughly divided into three sections: an introduction to chemical information, the primary literature, and the secondary literature and specialized search techniques. Each chapter is authored by a recognized subject matter expert who brings both subject knowledge and search experience to the work.

The introductory material attempts to put the rest of the book in context, presenting information about the chemical publishing enterprise and discussing copyright rights and restrictions. The primary literature is addressed in two chapters. Chapter 2, Non-Patent Primary Literature, presents the salient features of journal articles, conference papers, and reports, methods of locating and evaluating them, and tips for keeping up with current advances in your field. Chapter 3, Chemical Patents, presents a comprehensive overview of the patent as a legal and scientific document. The remainder of the book consists of chapters that teach practitioners to locate this primary literature, beginning with a chapter on text searching and the use (and misuse) of impact metrics and then moving into more specialized search techniques, including structure and substructure searching, finding properties of substances, identifying commercial sources and locating chemical safety and hazards information, polymer information retrieval, reaction searching, and performing sequence similarity searches using BLAST.

We hope that Chemical Information for Chemists: A Primer will aid you in developing sound strategies for retrieving data and literature related to your area of research by providing a clear explanation of search techniques and the underlying organization of the chemical literature; however, information retrieval is a very personalized skill. The more frequently you search for information, the more you will discover exactly which practices and procedures best suit your needs at each stage of your work. Conversation with information professionals and more experienced searchers can also help you to select an appropriate tool and strategy in a given situation. Chemical information is a science of trial and error; the more searches you try, the more applicable results you will retrieve, and the broader experience you will achieve. Before long, you will develop your own methods of finding what you need, allowing you to add information retrieval to the list of techniques you employ to succeed in your research.

Judith N. Currano

Dana L. Roth