News Index

Chemistry & Chemical Engineering Library News

June 2007

Pharmaceutical Substances Database

We now have access to Pharmaceutical Substances, Thieme's online compendium of information on pharmaceutical ingredients of interest to the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Entries include information on chemical structure, synthetic route, nomenclature, medical applications, toxicological data, patent information, commercial information and bibliographic information. Once you are at the site, click the blue "Login" button in the top left corner to open Pharmaceutical Substances. If you want to do structure or reaction searches, click on the "Advanced Search" button. Three structure editors are supported: ISIS/Draw, ChemDraw and Java/Applet.

Inorganic Crystal Structure Database (ICSD for WWW)

UCB students, faculty and staff now have access to the web version of the Inorganic Crystal Structure Database. The ICSD is a searchable database of more than 93,000 inorganic structures, including pure elements, minerals, metals, and intermetallic compounds. Search by fields such as element(s), citation information (author/journal/title/years), chemical/mineral name, crystal system, space group, minimum distance, cell size/mass, and Pearson Symbol. Access is by IP address so you should not be prompted for a password or login. You should have access to the database once you click on the link in the second paragraph titled "Login or use the Demo." Initially it seems you only have access to the Demo database, but once you enter a query, you actually are searching the Full database, if the system is working properly. Be sure to look at the bottom of your results page once you have entered a query, the "Demo database" text should have disappeared and all that remains is, "Full database will be used if available after the first query is entered".

Some people have reported difficulties in accessing the database so please note the instructions on the introductory page, especially: ICSD-for-WWW works with Win95 up to Mac-OSX & Linux, but not with old browsers. Do not disable popups, cookies or javascript. In the browser options, prefer to open new pages in a new window, not a new tab. If you have problems, use a modern browser like Mozilla Firefox. With Internet Explorer, please include ICSD as a "trusted site" under "security". Also note the Inorganic Crystal Structure Database (ICSD) Conditions of Use, "Information retrieved from the database shall not be passed on to third parties not belonging to the group of authorised users."

Current Protocols in Stem Cell Biology

We have trial access to Current Protocols in Stem Cell Biology from Wiley. The trial will run through the end of December 2007. As a reminder, the Library also licenses these series on protocols:

Currently, there are no plans to license Nature Protocols as there are two major issues regarding licensing Nature publications, price and lack of perpetual access to licensed materials. For more information see CDL’s Challenges to Licensing from Some Publishers.

H-Index

According to Jorge E. Hirsch, a physics professor at UCSD and creator of the h-index, the h-index is a way to estimate the broad impact of a scientist’s cumulative research contributions. The magazine Chemistry World recently published an article on the h-index that included a link to a list of living chemists with scores greater than 50 that was constructed by Harry Schaefer at the University of Georgia and his colleague Amy Peterson.

Whether you think the h-index is a valid metric or not, you can easily search the Web of Science to see your own h-index. To do so, first do a general search, not a cited ref search, in Web of Science on your name. If you have used different names/initial combinations over the course of your career you will have to “or” those variants together to get a comprehensive retrieval of your publications. The author index feature is a useful option for finding all your name variants. It is located just to the upper right of the author search box. Conversely, if you have a common name and need to limit the retrieval to just your own articles, use the address field along with your name to limit by the various institutions where you have worked. Often just a zip code such as 94720 is sufficient if all your work has been done at UCB and or LBNL.

Once you have your results, click the Citation Report button on the right side of the screen. The Citation Report generates graphical displays of your publications by year as well as citations in each year. It also sums your total number of times cited, calculates your h-index and lists all of your publications, sorted by times cited. If there are papers on the list which are not yours you can eliminate them by checking the check box next to those papers and then clicking on the “go” button. A new Citation Report will be generated without the papers you selected. If you would like to fine-tune your results you can use the Analyze Results button before you use the Citation Report button. For example, you could analyze your results by document type to eliminate meeting abstracts to increase your average citations per paper or you could eliminate review articles to determine the impact of just your research papers. Hirsch's article describing the h-index was published in PNAS.

New Journals

CDL recently purchased the backfile for the Journal of the American Ceramic Society so that our access is from volume 1, 1918, to current. The library purchased a new online subscription to Journal of Porphyrins and Phthalocyanines so that our access extends from volume 1, 1997, to current.

New Books

Send comments to Mary Ann Mahoney, Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Librarian