Chemical Abstracts Service survey

The lUPAC 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 lUPAC nomenclature, but the tremendous explosion of chemical knowledge 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 lUPAC names. In general, it is easier to make the mental connection between a chemical structure and its lUPAC name than its Chemical Abstracts name. 

Research articles of interest to biochemists may appear in many types of research journals. Research libraries do not have the funds necessary to subscribe to every journal, nor do scientists have the time to survey every current journal copy for articles of interest. Two publications that help scientists to keep up with published articles are Chemical Titles (published every 2 weeks by the American Chemical Society) and the weekly Current Contents available in hard copy and computer disks (published by the Institute of Science Information). The Life Science edition of Current Contents is the most useful for biochemists. The computer revolution has reached into the chemical and biochemical literature, and most college and university libraries now subscribe to computer bibliographic search services. One such service is STN International, the scientific and technical information network. This on-line system allows direct access to some of the world s largest scientific databases. The STN databases of most value to life scientists include BIOSIS Pre-views/RN (produced by Bio Sciences Information Service covers original research reports, reviews, and U.S. patents in biology and biomedicine), CA (produced by Chemical Abstracts service covers research reports in all areas of chemistry), MEDLINE, and MEDLARS (produced by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and Index Medicus, respectively cover all areas of biomedicine). These networks provide on-line service and their databases can be accessed from personal computers in the office, laboratory, or library. Some... 

Use of loose-leaf abstract forms is of particular value in the continuous collection of data for supplements to existing searches or surveys. As two of its services, the Information Section issues a Weekly Literature Notification Bulletin, which calls attention to articles of interest in the current literature, and the Chemical Abstracts bulletin already mentioned. During the preparation of each, abstract forms are filled out for all articles on subjects for which supplements will eventually be... 

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