Database Reviews and Reports
SciFinder Scholar
Physical Sciences Bibliographer
Science-Technology Library
The University of Akron
bolek@uakron.edu
Abstract
SciFinder Scholar gives students and faculty the ability to search the Chemical Abstracts family of databases for the years 1967 to the present. This search service has been available to academic institutions for a little over two years, whereas the commercial version, simply called SciFinder, is celebrating its fifth anniversary. Some commercial features were not included in SciFinder Scholar when it first became available, though some of these features have now been added. This review highlights ways that SciFinder Scholar distinguishes itself from other databases popular with chemists, and traces SciFinder Scholar's evolution over the past two and one-half years.
General Background
SciFinder Scholar (Scholar for short), a product of Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), enables students, staff, and faculty to search a wide array of chemical information sources within a single user-friendly interface. The system uses proprietary software, available for the Windows and Macintosh platforms, that must be installed on individual workstations. The software connects to CAS servers in Columbus, Ohio, through the Internet. Scholar became available in the Spring of 1998. Before that time, Chemical Abstracts could be searched online via the command-driven STN network or the more user-friendly web version, STN Easy. The print and CD-ROM versions were limited in their access points and more time-consuming to search. All of these options are still available.SciFinder Scholar currently provides seamless searching of the CAS family of databases: CAplus is an enhanced bibliographic file containing the entire Chemical Abstracts database from 1967 to present, and is updated weekly. The CAplus file includes all of printed CA as well as records for additional materials, such as American Chemical Society national meeting abstracts and citations from the 1,580 journals that CAS now abstracts cover-to-cover, but which do not meet the criteria for inclusion in the print index or the STN CA file. Registry is a database of chemical structures and names indexed by CAS since 1965 and partially retrospective before that time. CASREACT contains records of single and multistep chemical reactions from the Organic and Organometallic sections of CA, drawn from journals (1985-present) and patents (1991-present). CHEMCATS is a database of commercial suppliers for chemical compounds. CHEMLIST contains regulatory information records from 1979 forward. MEDLINE, added to SciFinder Scholar with the 2000 release, allows searching by Registry Number as well as keywords and subject headings.
Scholar is searchable by chemical structure, chemical name, CAS Registry Number, molecular formula, chemical reaction, research topic, author name, or specific reference (abstract number or patent number). Some enhancements were added with new releases of the software, while other enhancements took place without a new software release; these enhancements will be reviewed chronologically.
Version 1 - Spring 1998
A detailed review of Version 1, which is no longer available, appeared in the August 1998 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education (Somerville 1998). When starting Scholar, the following screen appeared for Versions 1 through 3:
![[Opening screen]](STRU3.GIF)
The first option, Chemical Substance or Reaction, gave the searcher the choice of drawing a chemical structure or entering a chemical name, CAS Registry Number, or molecular formula. After drawing the chemical structure, the Get Substances option searched the REGISTRY file for the exact structure as well as compounds in the same family, such as isotopes, stereoisomers, mixtures, salts, and polymers. Selecting Get Reactions executed a substructure search for the compound as a reactant or product in CASREACT. Version 1 did not include the option of searching chemical substructures in the REGISTRY file, and only one compound at a time could be searched in the CASREACT file.
Results from a chemical structure, chemical name, CAS registry number, or molecular formula search displayed the structures of all compounds matching the search. Clicking the Get References button displayed the CAplus references for the corresponding compounds. These references could be limited to preparations, reactions, and/or biological study.
The Research Topic option provides a box to enter a natural-language phrase to describe the topic. Scholar automatically combines terms, selects the appropriate database, and looks for variations (especially truncation), synonyms, and abbreviations of the terms. It is one of the few databases (chemical or otherwise) that processes natural language terms in a way that does not require the searcher to use special syntax. Depending on the number of terms and combinations it finds, Scholar provides the option of searching on some or all of the terms closely associated with one another, some or all of the terms present anywhere in the reference, or searching each term individually. The results can be refined further by adding an author name, document type, or publication year(s).
The third option, Author Name, asks for the author's last name and the first and middle names or initials, if known. Scholar automatically looks for spelling variations of the author's name.
The Specific Reference option allows a search on the CA accession number or patent number. While the user would not normally know these numbers ahead of time, this option comes in handy if more detailed information has to be retrieved later.
The references retrieved are displayed in reverse chronological order in a brief format that includes the author(s), title, source, CODEN, ISSN, accession number(s), and file name (CAplus). Clicking on a microscope icon to the right of each reference opens a window showing the full record, including the abstract and indexing terms and associated Registry Numbers. References may be printed or saved in the compact (title and accession number), standard (bibliographic information), summary (bibliographic information and abstract), or full (bibliographic information, abstract, and indexing) formats, although the summary format is the default.
Chakraborty, Manisha; McConville, David B.; Koser, Gerald F.; Tessier, Claire A.; Saito, Takeshi; Rinaldi, Peter L.; Youngs, Wiley J. A Novel High-Yield Synthesis of Substituted Isoindolequinones. J. Org. Chem. (1997), 62(23), 8193-8197. CODEN: JOCEAH ISSN:0022-3263. CAN 127:346265; AN 1997:724097 CAPLUS
References may be saved in a rich text, ASCII text, quoted, tagged, or answer keys (accession number) format. The various formats enable the user to view the references in a word processor (and retain all of the formatting, including the chemical structures), a spreadsheet, or bibliographic software such as EndNote, ProCite, or Reference Manager. Filters are available to aid in transferring the references to bibliographic software such as EndNote, ProCite, or Reference Manager.
Version 2 - November 1998
Version 2 of Scholar became available in November of 1998, and provided additional options for refining searches and also included links to several hundred full-text journals.In addition to refining results by author name, document type, and/or publication year(s), Scholar now allowed the searcher to refine by additional research topics and/or language, very welcome enhancements. Structure searches could be refined with an additional structure, allowing the user to specify the second component of a multicomponent substance. Similarly, a reaction search could be refined by drawing a second compound and searching them as two reactants, two products, or a reactant and a product simultaneously.
Scholar now provided links, through CAS' ChemPort web site, to the electronic full text of journals from participating publishers, such as AAAS, Academic Press, the American Chemical Society (ACS), the American Institute of Physics, the Institute of Physics, and the Royal Society of Chemistry. The list of publishers has grown since then, but noticeably absent are Elsevier, Wiley, and JSTOR. The "Full-Text" button in the Scholar window would launch a web browser and, using metadata, retrieve the PDF or HTML full text of the article in question, provided that the user's institution had an online subscription to that title.
New Options - February 1999
In February 1999, for a substantial added cost, Scholar provided the options of 24 hour-per-day access and/or substructure searching. Previously, Scholar had been available to academic users only during the off-peak hours of 5:00 PM to 5:00 AM weekdays and any time on the weekends, except for CAS' normal downtime from Saturday evening at 6:00 PM to Sunday morning at 8:00 AM Eastern Time.At this point, Scholar cost $15,000 per year for off-peak access for the first user and $6,000 per year for off-peak access for each subsequent user. To add daytime access cost an additional $10,000 per year for the first user. Adding substructure searching cost an additional $7,500 per year for the first user during the off-peak time, and more during the daytime hours. These charges were in addition to the cost of a print subscription to CA, which cost at least $20,000 per year for schools granting a Ph.D. in chemistry and $10,000 per year for smaller schools. Very few schools could afford 24 hour-per-day access with substructure searching for enough concurrent users to satisfy the demand on their campuses. Most schools had to decide between adding 24 hour-per-day access or substructure searching, or adding one user with 24 hour-per-day access and another user with off-peak substructure searching. For the latter arrangement, two separate passwords were needed, which in turn required two separate installations of the software on each computer.
Patent Image Links - March 1999
In March 1999, Scholar added links from the patent records in CAplus to the patent images at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and European Patent Office (EPO) web sites. The USPTO has the full text and patent images of all U.S. patents from 1976 to the present, although the images are in the TIFF format and require a special browser plug-in. The USPTO recently added the images, but not the full text, of most U.S. patents from 1790 to 1975. The EPO has the images of many American, European, and Japanese patents in Adobe Acrobat's PDF format. Images for patents from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, and Denmark are available from the EPO web site for the years 1920 to the present, whereas coverage for patents from other countries is less extensive. [Note: Unable to connect 3/25/01]
Version 3 - September 1999
Version 3 of Scholar became available in September 1999 and included the following enhancements:- A full
reaction query tool.
A button (A-->B) was added to the structure drawing area to help one specify each structure as a reactant or product. Atoms could now be mapped from the reactant to the product. - Patent families were added as a hyperlink in the full record
display. Since CA indexes only the first patent issued, which is often not in
English, the ability to see which countries issued equivalent patents was a
distinct improvement. Unfortunately, most of this reviewer's users did not take
advantage of the hyperlink because they did not know its purpose or because the
information contained in the hyperlink was not included when the abstract was
printed or downloaded. The hyperlink is quite often useful for locating English
language equivalents of foreign patents.
- A computer icon now appeared underneath the microscope icon to
indicate that the full-text of the journal or patent might be available. Clicking
this icon would launch a web browser and offer links to the full-text. Again, it
did not necessarily mean that one's school had an electronic subscription, but the
user no longer had to guess whether the full text was available somewhere.
- Windows users could install Molecular Simulations' WebLab ViewerLite software to view three-dimensional molecular structure models. The models can be rotated, scaled, edited, labeled, and analyzed to provide better understanding of 3D chemical structures.
February 2000 Enhancements
In February 2000 CAS added the following enhancements, which had been available for quite some time to their commercial SciFinder customers:When searching for the more common chemical substances in the REGISTRY file portion of Scholar, a hyperlink labeled "Commercial Sources" indicates substances that appear in the CHEMCATS supplier file. Following this link displays a list of commercial suppliers of the substance. A separate hyperlink labeled "Regulated Chemicals Listing" indicates that the substance appears in the CHEMLIST file, which lists the national chemical regulatory inventories of the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, Japan, Korea, or the Philippines.
The "analyze references" feature helps reveal trends in the literature retrieved and can help narrow large results sets. One can analyze by author name, CAS registry number, CA section title, company/organization, document type, index term, journal name, language, publication year, or supplementary term. Analyzing by journal name is one of the most useful choices, especially when verifying an incomplete or questionable reference. The Analyze tool can be applied to all of the references retrieved or just to selected ones; the resulting histogram can be sorted alphabetically or by frequency of occurrence.
New Pricing - March 2000
CAS announced New pricing for Scholar on March 31, 2000. Annual subscriptions were no longer dependent on a subscription to print CA, and new subscribers were offered 24-hour access only, although existing subscribers could renew with off-peak access if they desired. Also, for the first time, different pricing structures were offered based on the highest chemistry degree granted by the school.
| Highest Chemistry Degree Offered | Annual Price of First User without the Substructure Module | Annual Price of First User with the Substructure Module |
|---|---|---|
| Doctoral | $26,250 | $38,050 |
| Master's | $19,690 | $28,540 |
| Bachelor's | $13,125 | $19,025 |
![[Opening screen]](SCHOLAR1.GIF)
