Organic Chemist's Desk Reference

Caroline Cooper, Rupert Purchase

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351647090
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Bioquímica en medicina

Launched in 1995 as a companion to the Dictionary of Organic Compounds, the Organic Chemist's Desk Reference has been essential reading for laboratory chemists who need a succinct guide to the 'nuts and bolts' of organic chemistry — the literature, nomenclature, stereochemistry, spectroscopy, hazard information, and laboratory data. This third edition reflects changes in the dissemination of chemical information, revisions to chemical nomenclature, and the adoption of new techniques in NMR spectroscopy, which have taken place since publication of the last edition in 2011. Organic chemistry embraces many other disciplines — from material sciences to molecular biology — whose practitioners will benefit from the comprehensive but concise information brought together in this book. Extensively revised and updated, this new edition contains the very latest data that chemists need access to for experimentation and research.

1 The Organic Chemistry Literature

The transition this century of chemistry information to web-based electronic resources, supplemented by printed reference books, offers rapid access to the organic chemistry literature. In general, electronic resources provide data in three broad areas: (1) information on authors, subjects, citations, or full text of the primary and secondary literature; (2) factual or property information for particular chemical compounds; and (3) synthetic targets via chemical structure databases. The choice and usage of an electronic database or reference book will depend on the particular requirements and preferences of the organic chemist. This chapter:

• Surveys the more commonly used electronic databases and electronic dictionaries used by organic chemists to search the abstract and secondary literature.
• Lists some useful reference books, review series and textbooks for the organic chemist.
• Explains the patent literature and provides advice on retrieving patents from patent databases.

Journals encompassing the primary literature of organic chemistry are listed in Chapter 2.

1.1 ABSTRACTING AND OTHER CURRENT AWARENESS SERVICES

1.1.1 CHEMICAL ABSTRACTS AND SCIFINDER^®

Available in print format from 1907 to 2009, Chemical Abstracts, published by Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), a division of the American Chemical Society, justly claimed to be the ‘key to the world’s chemical literature’. CAS has incorporated Chemical Abstracts into an electronic database, Chemical Abstracts Plus (CAplus^SM), and has developed a number of other electronic databases of abstracted chemical information. These databases may be searched with a web-based product, SciFinder, marketed by CAS. STN^® (Scientific & Technical Information Network), operated jointly by CAS and FIZ Karlsruhe, offers an alternative platform for interrogating CAS databases and has an enhanced capacity for searching the patent and related literature such as trade magazines. SciFinder and STN are subscription services accessed through an approved internet protocol (IP) address.

Some institutions that do not subscribe to SciFinder or STN still hold the printed volumes of Chemical Abstracts and the CA Collective Indexes, often augmented by Chemical Abstracts™ Web Edition (Section 1.1.1.1) and Chemical Abstracts on CD-ROM (Section 1.1.1.2).

CAS products and other databases that are available using SciFinder include:

• CAplus^SM – abstracts the chemistry literature (journals and patents) from 1907 to the present and has in excess of 44 million records, plus more than 224,000 records from earlier years:
  • Journal of the American Chemical Society, 1879–1906 (volumes 1–28)
  • Journal of Physical Chemistry, 1896–1906 (volumes 1–10)
  • Royal Society of Chemistry journals, 1841–1906
  • Chemisches Zentralblatt (a German-language abstracting publication that ran from 1830 to 1969; see Section 1.1.7), 1897–1906
  • More than 500 frequently cited landmark papers of enduring value, 1900–1912
  • More than 38,000 US patents published from 1808 to 1906.
• MEDLINE^® (coverage back to 1946) – contains more than 22 million references to journal articles in the life sciences from over 5,600 journals.
• CAS REGISTRY^SM – a structure and text-searchable database containing information on approximately 125 million organic and inorganic substances and 66 million sequences, with their associated CAS registry numbers. Substances reported in the literature back to 1802 are recorded. A CAS registry number is a unique numerical identifier assigned to a chemical substance – see Section 15.2 for further information.
• CASREACT^® – a structure and text-searchable organic chemical reaction database containing more than 93.8 million reactions (>79.7 million single- and multistep reactions and >14 million synthetic preparations). Coverage is from 1840 to the present. The inclusion of experimental details abstracted from some journals and patents is a recent feature of this database.
• CHEMCATS^® – a database of in excess of 69 million commercially available chemicals from more than 900 suppliers and 1,000 catalogues.
• CHEMLIST^® – lists regulated substances on the Environmental Protection Agency Toxic Substances Control Act Inventory, the European Inventory of Existing Commercial Chemical Substances and the Domestic and Non-domestic Substances List from Canada, plus lists of hazardous substances from other national or international inventories of regulated chemicals. Over 347,000 substances are detailed.
• MARPAT^® – contains in excess of 1.2 million Markush structures (see Chapter 14 for an explanation of a Markush structure) and over 473,000 patent records.

Statistics quoted for these CAS databases illustrate the size of their content in late 2016. However, with approximately 15,000 new substances added daily to CAS REGISTRY, these figures will quickly become out of date. The CAS website http://www.cas.org/content/at-a-glance provides current statistical data on CAS products (accessed 18 December 2016). CAS offers the most comprehensive access to chemical information. Its substance database is estimated to be double the size of Reaxys^® (Section 1.1.2).

Three basic methods for searching SciFinder are available from its opening page: Explore Reference, Explore Substance and Explore Reaction. Explore Reference provides seven additional search options: research topic, author name, company name, document identifier, journal, patent and tags. Searching by research topic is a versatile search option and allows for searches by topic or keyword (name reaction). Further guidance for searching SciFinder is available from a CAS website (https://www.cas.org/training/scifinder; accessed 19 December 2016).

CAS Full Text Options link users of SciFinder to the online literature and provides electronic patent documents from five patent offices: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Espacenet (European Patent Office), SIPO (State Intellectual Property Office of the People’s Republic of China), JPO (Japanese Patent Office) and KIPRIS (Korea Intellectual Property Rights Information Service). Participating publishers in SciFinder’s Full Text Options are listed on a useful free CAS website (http://chemport.cas.org/cgi-bin/cps; accessed 2 January 2017).

1.1.1.1 Chemical Abstracts web edition

https://www.cas.org/help/caweb/whnjs.htm. Accessed 17 December 2016. Chemical Abstracts web edition was introduced in 2008 and is an alternative (but limited compared with SciFinder) web-based product for accessing Chemical Abstracts. Chemical Abstracts web edition is a subscription service, accessed by institutional IP authentication, and it has the following features:

• Electronic access to fully indexed records in CAS databases corresponding to the customer’s subscription period to Chemical Abstracts, but only from 1996 to present.
• Multiple ways to browse information, including:
  • Bibliographic indexes
  • Subject indexes
  • Substance indexes (CAS registry numbers, chemical names and molecular formulae).
• Basic and advanced search capabilities with refine options.
• Capability to search across multiple years.

1.1.1.2 Chemical Abstracts on CD-ROM

The printed 10th to 15th Chemical Abstracts Collective Indexes and abstracts (1977–2006) were also produced in a CD-ROM format, and annual updates were issued from 2007 to 2011, when production of the CD-ROM format ceased. These CD-ROM versions of Chemical Abstracts incorporate a number of useful and browsable search indexes with Boolean functionality and offer more flexible searches compared with Chemical Abstracts Web Edition. The indexes searchable on the CD-ROM version of Chemical Abstracts (1977–2011) are:

word index; CAS registry number index; author index; general subject index; patent index; formula index; compound index; chemical abstract number index; organisation; journal title index; language index; year of publication index; document type index.

1.1.1.3 CAS Source Index (CASSI)

The Chemical Abstracts Service Source Index, commonly referred ...