Chemical Abstracts Service was founded in 1907 and the first volume contained 15,000 abstracts. Today over 1 million abstracts from 9,000 journals, patents and other literature sources are added per year. Over 25 million chemistry-related abstracts, 27 million organic and inorganic substance records, 57 million sequences, and 10 million reaction schema are available to the scientific research community through this collection of databases. Chemical Abstracts is the single largest resource for chemical information in the broadest sense, with high overlap in medicine, biology, physics, materials, agriculture, geology, and the SciFinder Scholar interface is designed for use by practicing scientists in a variety of chemistry-related disciplines. This class will focus especially on searching the bibliographic riches of Chemical Abstracts using the natural language Research Topic search and reference analyzing tools.

Advanced searching features: substructure, similarity, polymer, reaction/synthetic.

A search for information on a chemical substance may start with a common or trade name, a standard indexed name, a root name, a class of compounds, a molecular formula, a chemical structure, a ring skeleton, a registry number, a role in a reaction, an element count, or a myriad of other associated words or coding systems. With over 22 million organic and inorganic substances currently registered in Chemical Abstracts and so many ways to represent them, the complexities of substance searching can seem overwhelming. This class will explore searching by chemical name, molecular formula, registry number, structure, substructure and other techniques for identifying compounds in the literature.

A reaction mechanism is "a detailed description of a particular reactant to product path, together with information pertaining to intermediates, transition states, stereochemistry, the rate-limiting step, electronic excitation and transfer, and the presence of any loose or intimate electron ion pairs." (Ash, 1985) Reaction chemists are interested in a variety of information pieces surrounding reaction mechanisms and need great flexibility in searching to thoroughly probe the literature. In recent years specialized reaction chemistry databases have developed sophisticated interfaces to assist in complex reaction searching. This class will explore the reaction searching options and techniques available to the Cornell community in the Beilstein Crossfire and SciFinder Scholar databases.