Medicinal chemical literature, searching

The technical information department of the research and development division of a manufacturer of fine chemicals has many interesting problems in searching for information in the medicinal chemical literature and that of pertinent and allied fields. Three such representative problems have been selected for presentation. 

ADDINALL AND STECHER—SEARCHING MEDICINAL CHEMICAL LITERATURE... 

This volume contains six reviews, some of which have a chemical bias while others concentrate on biological topics. The first chapter describes the advantages of computerized literature searching in the medicinal sciences and, in a sample output which covers a few months literature, illustrates how valuable the MEDLARS system can be. Then follows a chapter on the medicinally and toxi-cologically important coumarins. 

It also includes Searching the PB collection for Chemical Information , Standards and Specifications and information on translations. Both works have extensive lists of literature references. A third ACS publication in the series is the Key to the Pharmaceutical and Medicinal Chemistry Literature (No. 16,... 

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... 

Table 2.2 also lists three publicly available databases commonly used in drug research. PubChem is accessed through the National Library of Medicine (Austin et al., 2004) and contains chemical structure information and corresponding activity across a number of biological assays. The system links the compound information with biomedical literature and it is possible to perform web-based similarity searching. PubChem also enables one to download files with structures to perform chemoinformatic analysis off-line. 

Medhne MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online) is a bibhographic database. It contains more than 16 million references to journal articles starting from 1949 till present. All the records in MEDLINE are indexed with Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). MEDLINE is a part of PubMed and covers the subjects of biomedicine and health, chemical sciences, bioengineering, etc. MEDLINE is the primary component of PubMed (http //pubmed.gov) a link to PubMed is found on the National Library of Medicine (NLM) home page at http // www.nlm.nih.gov. The result of a MEDLINE/PubMed search is a list of citations (including authors, tide, source, and often an abstract) to journal articles and an indication of free electronic full-text availability. 

Chloroanisoles and chlorophenols are responsible for musty and medicinal taints, respectively, in foods. If one searches the literature, the majority of reported cases of contamination with these chemicals are in Europe, Australia, and Japan there are... 

The aim of this review is to provide the available data about phytocompounds targeting insulin resistance associated with diabetes. The data infor-mation were collected from the available literature at various databases, including PubMed, Science Direct, and Scopus till September 2013. Key search words included medicinal plants, phytochemicals, insulin resistance, antidiabetic plants, glucose uptake, and insulin sensitivity. Moreover, the antidiabetic activity of these phytocompounds, their chemical stmcture, the plant origin, and the mechanisms of action are discussed in the present review. 

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