Secondary sources, literature

Journal articles and patents contain virtually all of the original work in organic chemistry. However, if this were all, if there were no indexes, abstracts, review articles, and other secondary sources, the literature would be unusable because it is so vast that no one could hope to find anything in particular. Fortunately, the secondary sources are excellent. There are various kinds and the categories tend to merge. Our classification is somewhat arbitrary. 

Wherever appropriate, we have included references to selected secondary sources. They contain more detailed discussions on the topics introduced in this book. In all cases, we recommend use of the primary literature. The examples in the following pages are but a small taste of the detail, variation, scope and experimental detail available. Our choices reflect our personal interests there is no better or worse implied We tried to use current examples from journals that seem to be most commonly accessible, both in paper form and electronically, to student and professional alike. 

In an effort to avoid reproducing indexing errors from other systems, hard copy of all articles selected for inclusion into the data base is always obtained before information is entered into the ETIC file. When a complete copy of an article is in hand, the bibliographic data are entered into the computer. The fields that are entered include the author, title, citation, literature type, language or translation notes, secondary source, and selected abstracts. The technical staff then indexes the data using experimental parameters that allow searching in a variety of ways specific to the interests of the users. Only that portion of the paper concerned with teratology or... 

The major secondary sources of literature are listed in Table I. The single most important item is the two-volume compendium edited by Kochi 126). It will be noticed that the role of organic free radicals in transition metal chemistry, except for Co(II) derivatives, is a rather new area and constitutes a major theme of our article (Sections III-V). With regard to metal-centered radicals (Section II), we concentrate particularly on those that have considerable kinetic stability, e.g., Sn[CH(SiMe3)2].-i, another recent development 48). 

This section is devoted to numerical tabulations of various physical properties. They are convenient, but some are distinctly secondary sources of information. It is often difficult to judge the quality of the data listed, since references to the original sources are sometimes inadequate and transcription errors can occur. If at all possible, it is wise to confirm important information by consulting the original literature. 

When one wishes to synthesize a given compound, it is normal practice to search the literature as described above in order to find out by what methods the compound has been synthesized, or in the case of new compounds, how related compounds have been synthesized. The procedures reported in the literature are of variable reliability and are often rather incomplete. Therefore it is advisable to look in some secondary sources to see if more complete or reliable information may be found. The first such source would be Organic Syntheses. This series of publications gives complete methods for the preparation of a large number of organic compounds. Each procedure has been submitted by one laboratory, checked by another, and is supplied with a complete set of notes which should enable anyone to prepare the compound satisfactorily. Similar volumes on related subjects have appeared and are entitled Inorganic Syntheses and Biochemical Preparations. ... 

Faults and fractures can act as pathways for the migration of He derived from the crust and mantle, and hence are possible secondary sources for anomalies located during exploration surveys. The potential use of He surveys to locate deep faults, and any associated mineralisation, has been discussed in the Russian literature in particular. Faults in seismically-active zones similarly act as channelways for the escape of gases, and He is one of a number of components of soil gas and groundwater that are monitored to determine whether variations in concentration can be used in the prediction of earthquakes. 

AJHP is abstracted and indexed by all the major secondary sources (e.g., International Pharmaceutical Abstracts, Biological Abstracts, Chemical Abstracts, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Current Contents Clinical Medicine, Current Contents Life Sciences, Excerpta Medica, Index Medicus, and the Iowa Drug Information Service. 

Compilations are frequently cited as the sources of PZCs/IEPs data. Parks [1] compiled the PZCs/IEPs of (hydr)oxides published up to 1965. PZCs/IEPs of (hydr)oxides and other materials published over the period 1966-1999 were compiled by the present author [2], and the updates [3065-3067] cover the period 2000-2005. The above five publications report a vast majority of reliable PZC/ IEP values published up to 2005. Several other reviews of PZCs/IEPs have been published. The reviews of PZCs limited to particular materials (e.g., iron oxides and silicon nitride) are cited in this book in the sections devoted to those materials. Many reviews report only one value (range) of PZC for a given material. These recommended values are close to the median of the values cited for those materials in this book, with a few exceptions. Typically, the PZC values are referenced (original literature or secondary sources). 

Reliability data has recently been found for a very small number of compovmds in this listing. Efforts are continuing in the search for reliability data to support the remaining values in the primary literature. Structures not given in this list will be foimd in the Main List (Appendix A). Common secondary sources are given in this Appendix in abbreviated form ... 

In addition to the primary and secondary sources, there is a growing body of review literature in which information on particular topics is gathered together, sifted, evaluated and reported. As the volume of literature continues to grow it is likely that these reviews and monographs will play an increasingly important role. It is also fairly common for these review-type articles to be rounded out with some original information. 

However, retrieval services cater for both current-awareness and retrospective search needs. Whilst computerised document retrieval services are useful for current awareness, there has been much activity to apply computer techniques to actual information retrieval, particularly for retrospective searching. This has taken the form of setting up specialised data banks for numeric and structurail information. These are a form of secondary service but are more closely related to handbooks and encyclopaedias than to abstract publications. (Data handbooks, etc., are sometimes referred to as tertiary sources, but since secondary sources are guides to the primary, the term tertiary sources is more accurately applied to guides to the secondary literature s).)... 

We have seen that there are essentially three different kinds of information in the chemical literature — (1) numerical, (2) conceptual, (3) structural. Computerised retrieval from the primary literature is as yet embryonic, and we must therefore turn om attention mainly to secondary sources. The normal secondary sources deal largely with words, t. e. conceptual information, the other typ>es of information being dealt with by specialised systems. Computer search services therefore use machine-readable versions of the standard sources for cmrent-awareness, specialised systems being used for retrospective searching. 

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