This blog provides information about events, services, and news items from the White Memorial Chemistry Library. The blog is managed by Svetla Baykoucheva (sbaykouc@umd.edu), head of the Library. Please send us feedback about our services and how we could improve them. Visit the Library's Web page at www.lib.umd.edu/CHEM/index.html
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White Memorial Chemistry Library Blog

LibGuide for Chemical and Life Sciences Information

May 11th, 2012 by Svetla

You can find chemical and life sciences information at this LibGuide:

http://lib.guides.umd.edu/chemistryresources

You will be able to access databases and journals directly from it. Instructional materials for the databases and how to manage citations with EndNote Web also are provided.

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Interviews

by Svetla

Interviews with scientists, information specialists, librarians, and editors that were published in the Chemical Information Bulletin are available at www.acscinf.org/publications/interviews.php

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Comparison of CAPLUS and MEDLINE

by Svetla

Baykoucheva, S. Comparison of the Contributions of CAPLUS and MEDLINE to the Performance of SciFinder in Retrieving the Drug Literature. Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship 2011 (Summer).

Abstract: SciFinder (SF) is a platform that provides access to two large databases, the Chemical Abstracts database (CAPLUS) and MEDLINE. This article analyzes and compares the individual and combined contributions of these two databases to the performance of SF in retrieving the drug literature. Test searches in which the names of two individual drugs (lisinopril and lovastatin) and a group of drugs (SSRI antidepressants) were used as keywords retrieved document sets that were analyzed for total and annual literature output, document types, journal coverage, and language of publication. While the total literature output from CAPLUS was larger than the output from MEDLINE (which was attributed to the presence of patents), MEDLINE performed significantly better than CAPLUS in retrieving the non-patent literature. The overlap of documents between CAPLUS and MEDLINE was found to be only 20-24%, depending on the name of the drug used to perform the searches. This article analyzes the strengths and the weaknesses of CAPLUS and MEDLINE and shows how these two databases, when searched together in SF, complement each other in covering the drug literature. In addition to the extended coverage of the literature, SF provides sophisticated (but easy-to-use) refining and analytical tools not available on some other platforms.

http://www.istl.org/11-summer/refereed1.html 

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Free software for structure drawing

by Svetla

Accelrys Draw is free for personal and academic use. It includes name to structure and structure to name functionality for IUPAC names and some trivial/generic ones, InChI name, SMILES, Chimestring, and some more technical ones that are only structure to name: InChI key and NEMA key. The IUPAC functionality allows you to add your own structure/name pairs.

Register at: http://accelrys.com/products/informatics/cheminformatics/draw/no-fee.php, download the software and install it.

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Comparing MEDLINE, Scopus, and Web of Science

March 18th, 2011 by Svetla

If you are wondering which database to use to retrieve drug literature, this article may help you:

Baykoucheva, Svetla. Selecting a Database for Drug Literature Retrieval: A Comparison of MEDLINE, Scopus, and Web of Science, Science & Technology Libraries, 29:4, 276 - 288

Abstract

Three widely used databases—MEDLINE, Scopus, and Web of Science—were compared for their relative ability to retrieve the largest number of articles within the drug literature, using three search terms: two for specific drugs (atorvastatin and olanzapine) and one for a major class of drugs (statins). These drugs and the class of drugs were chosen for their longevity and continued high clinical and scientific interest, as indicated by the many articles concerning them published in scholarly and professional journals over the last two decades. Significant differences were observed in the journal coverage and the number of documents each database retrieved, with Scopus significantly outperforming the other two databases in these respects. Based on the results from this limited but by no means atypical study of comparative strengths and degree of coverage, the best option for retrieving the largest numbers of articles on a particular drug in the literature would be to use both Scopus and Web of Science, as these two databases complement each other with respect to the journal coverage. MEDLINE retrieved much smaller numbers of documents in all searches and should be used only when the other two databases are not available.

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