Finding Articles in Chemistry
When people come into the library to look for a journal article, they are usually starting in one of two ways: they either already have a reference to a particula article (or at least a partial reference), or they have a topic or author and they're looking for material on that topic or by that author. And always...remember that if you run into a problem, ASK! for help.
Known Item Search
These are usually (although not always) the easiest searches, since (theoretically) you've already got all the information except the actual location of the article. The trick is that it helps to know what kind of publication that the article is in. The following table gives you a quick guide to some common publication types. (If your citation has an abbreviated journal title, you'll need to first get the full title from on the the abbreviation sources.)
| Common reference types | Category of reference | To find location check |
|---|---|---|
| Ferch, H. Plastics, Paint Rubber 1996, 10, 85-86 | Journal articles | E-Journals List page |
| Beall, H.; Trimbur, J., A Short Guide to Writing about Chemistry, 2nd ed.; Longman: New York, 2001; pp 17-32. | Books | The CAT. Browse search by tiele or authors (A short Guide...or Beall, H.) |
| Reid, C.J.; Ballantine, J.A. In Analytical Applications of Spectroscopy II, Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference of Spectroscopy across the Spectum, Hatfield, UK, 1990; Davies, A.M.C.; Creaser, C.S., Eds.; Royal Society of Chemistry: Cambridge, UK, 1991. | Conference proceeding papers | The CAT. "Browse" search by title (Analytical Applications of Spectroscopy II) |
| King, K.J. Development of a Pressurized System for Oxidation Studies of Volatile Fluides. M.S. Thesis, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, March 1983. | Master's thesis and doctoral dissertations | The CAT, if Penn State. "Browse" search by title or author (Development of a Pressurized...or King, K.J.) |
These types of searches involve the use of indexes. Indexes are publications that provide access to the intellectual content of other publications, such as journals, patents, conference proceeedings, etc. Two very important ones for chemists are: Chemical Abstracts and Science Citation Index. You'll probably be more familiar with them by the names of their electronic counterparts: SciFinder Scholar and Web of Science.
SciFinder Scholar is actually a combination of five different databases:
- Chemical Abstracts (indexes journal articles, conference proceedings, patents, and chemical dissertations back to 1907)
- Medline (online version of Index Medicus. Covers the medical literature back to 1966)
- Chemical Abstracts Registry File (indexes the chemicals described in Chemical Abstracts and provides CAS Registry Numbers for them. It is also searchable by chemical structure)
- CAS Reacts (a chemical reactions database)
- ChemCATS (links to chemical catalogs)
Chemical Abstracts Service has prepared a series of online tutorials to help you learn how to use the different features included in SciFinder Scholar, so I'll just refer you to the CAS training website for that information.
Web of Science is a combination of three databases:
- Science Citation Index
- Social Science Citation Index
- Arts and Humanities Citation Index
ISI, the publisher, has prepared a Web of Science tutorial to introduce you to the features of the database. Once you have found the references that you want, you can then just follow the information above regarding Know Item Searching to get to the articles that you want.
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- Updated: 08/18/08
- U.Ed. LIB 05-62
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Nan Butkovich
Physical and Mathematical Sciences Library
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or
John Meier
Physical and Mathematical Sciences Library
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