A Brief History of Systematic Organic Nomenclature

A second International conference was held in 1911, but the intrusion of World War I prevented any substantive revisions of the Geneva rules. The International Union of Chemistry was established in 1930 and undertook the necessary revision leading to publication in 1930 of what came to be known as the Liege rules. 

After World War II, the International Union of Chemistry became the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (known in the chemical community as the lUPAQ. Since 1949, the lUPAC has issued reports on chemical nomenclature on a regular basis. The most recent iUPAC rules for organic chemistry were published in 1993. The IUPAC rules often offer several different ways to name a single compound. Thus although it is true that no two com- 

The 1993 IUPAC recommendations and their more widely used 1979 predecessors may both be accessed at the same web site  

The IUPAC rules are not the only nomenclature system in use today. Chemical Abstracts Service surveys all the world s leading scientific Journals that publish papers relating to chemistry and publishes brief abstracts of those papers. The publication Chemical Abstracts and its indexes are absolutely essential to the practice of chemistry. For many years Chemical Abstracts nomenclature was very similar to IUPAC nomenclature, but the tremendous explosion of chemical knowledge in recent years has required Chemical Abstracts to modify its nomenclature so that its indexes are better adapted to computerized searching. This means that whenever feasible, a compound has a single Chemical Abstracts name. Unfortunately, this Chemical Abstracts name may be different from any of the several IUPAC names. In general, it is easier to make the mental connection between a chemical structure and its IUPAC name than its Chemical Abstracts name. 

It Is worth noting that the generic name of a drug Is not directly derived from systematic nomenclature. Furthermore, different pharmaceutical companies will call the same drug by their own trade name, which is different from its generic name. Generic names are invented on request (for a fee) by the U.S. Adopted Names Council, a private organization founded by the American Medical Association, the American Pharmaceutical Association, and the U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention. 

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