CrossFire Abstracts

CrossFire Abstracts is a companion to the highly popular in-house database management system Cross-Fir .-/.< jReactions. It provides immediate access to the whole Beilstein knowledge base, with 7 million compounds, 10 million reactions, 20 million factual data, and 50 million hyperlinks, and also to titles and abstracts from the organic chemical literature from 1980 to the present. (See CrossFire Abstracts Titles and Abstracts from the Organic Chemical Literature.)... 

CROSSFIRE ABSTRACTS TITLES AND ABSTRACTS FROM THE ORGANIC CHEMICAL LITERATURE... 

CrossFire Abstracts Titles and Abstracts from the Organic Chemical Literature... 

CrossFire Abstracts is a companion to the highly popular CrossFir. -j Reactions System and provides access to titles and abstracts from the organic chemical literature, from 1980 to the present. Accessible via the Beilstein Commander , CrossFire Abstracts is a key datafield in the citations domain and allows one to search for words contained in the title or abstract of an excerpted document. The Fact Editor (Figure 1) already permits the formulation of a great variety of inquiries. Searches can be made by author, by any one of the journals excerpted, by publication year, by words included in the abstract, or by words contained in the title of the report. 

CrossFire Abstracts affords the most complete coverage of organic chemistry available. It is also very flexible, one can search for words in abstract and/or journal titles, focus on a time frame of interest take the resulting hit set and examine all the reactions, and all the compounds described in any one paper of interest and then hyperlink to one specific structure to gain access to 400 fields of chemical and physical properties, preparations, purifications, and methods of analysis, all with complete literature references. Beilstein covers the field dating from 1779 to the present. 

Several of the software tools used most frequently today include Beilstein Crossfire (information at www.mdli.com) and SciFinder from the Chemical Abstracts Service (www.cas.org/scifinder/) for structure-based reaction searches. Reagent availability information is often searched with MDL s ACD and CAS s SciFinder. Special compound collections and contract services offered by new companies such as ChemNavigator (www.chemnavigator.com)... 

The CrossFire Beilstein database is the world s largest compilation of chemical facts. This database indexes three primary data domains substances, reactions and literature. The substance domain stores structural information with aU associated facts and literature references, including chemical, physical and bioactivity data. The reaction domain details the preparation of substances, enabling scientists to investigate specific reaction pathways with reaction search queries. The literature domain includes citations, titles and abstracts, which are hyperhnked to the substance and reaction domain entries. It contains over 320 million experimental data, over 10 million reactions and data indexed from over 175 journals. 

Current IUPAC and Chemical Abstracts nomenclature has been employed in this index with the former given preference. Substitutive nomenclature has been given preference over radicofunc-tional, additive, subtractive, conjunctive or replacement nomenclature, except where this becomes unwieldy. With many bicyclic and polycyclic compounds bearing heteroatoms, standard bicyclic or polycyclic oxa, aza, and thia replacement nomenclature has often been used. With certain functional groups, where the names are rather complex and probably not familiar to most organic chemists, such as ylides, those compounds have simply been named as sulfur, tellurium and arsonic ylides. Metal catbenes have been treated similarly. With more complex functionality and many heterocycles, the Beilstein Commander Crossfire nomenclature system has been used with certain modifications. 

While many technical reference libraries have Beilstein in print form, it is more convenient to search for information in the electronic form of the database, hi addition, the printed series is no longer being updated. The electronic database allows a variety of searches on compounds and properties. Access to the electronic database is offered through CrossFire Beilstein [see http //www.mdl.com] or through the STN database system of the Chemical Abstracts Service [http //www.cas.org/stn.html]. Some details given in the print version (such as experimental methods) were not carried over to the electronic version, so in some cases it may be necessary to consult the print version or the literature citation for further information. 

When the comparison is with the real chemical world, novelty concerns much smaller numbers. In March 2002, the Chemical Abstracts Registry file contained more than 37 million chemical substance registrations, which contained almost 19.5 million organic and inorganic substances. The CrossFire Beilstein database contained data on over 8 million organic compounds on the same search date. It is a tedious exercise, but very much worth the effort, to take databases such as these based on Beilstein and remove trivial small molecules ( non-druglike ) and see how many compounds remain. The result is less than half a million. 

Most scientists use electronic services such as Dialogue, the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) of the American Chemical Society, the Scientific and Technical Information Network (STN), CrossFire, NetFire, etc. to search the literature a smaller subset use individualized search profiling to electronically access current journals but few utilize authorized access to collaborators research notebooks. Why should our research notebooks not become a shareable feast . For the first time our personal notebooks can become a controlled group electronic resource. 

A new and valuable literature based database and search system, called NetFire, has recently been made available on the Internet by Beilstein Information Systems. It is the first attempt by Beilstein to provide chemical information outside the main area of extracted and evaluated data. The existing Beilstein system, provided via their CrossFire system, is an in-house system which has received wide acceptance since it was introduced in the mid 1990s. NetFire is a very new and different system, a valuable Internet resource. It is yet another example of the innovation of new and modem electronic products by Beilstein. NetFire provides free access to titles, abstracts, and authors from the organic chemical literature, from 1980 to the present. ... 

Many chemists therefore take the view that the Beilstein and Gmelin files may be regarded as factual files, while the CAS and Derwent files are not. In the sense of the approach of the present article, this is certainly unfair to the latter pair, It is certainly true that in particular cases the generalized description of a property described in a generalized way in the abstract of a document may lead to valuable results which would be difficult or impossible to obtain without this form of soft data retrieval. For this very reason, Beilstein s CrossFire system has now started to include more and more soft data in the form of abstracts, titles, and other qualitative free text in its databases. 

Chemical Abstracts, Beilstein, and Gmelin via Crossfire and some other indices are wonderful tools for finding articles. 

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