Abstracts and Indexes in Chemistry and related areas

Information from primary sources has been collected together and organized under subject headings and authors in secondary publications called Abstracts and Indexes. These are published at regular intervals - weekly, monthly or quarterly - and are usually brought together, or cumulated, annually or for even longer intervals.
From the beginning, all abstracts and indexes were published in paper format, but now most of these publications are available on CD-ROM or accessible for online searching on a remote host computer and/or via the Internet, and the paper editions are decreasing.

The following is a selection of paper format (most of them are available in machine-readable format as well) abstracts and indexes in Chemistry and related areas:

Chemical Abstracts
Columbus, Ohio: American Chemical Society, 1907-
52 issues per year + semi-annual and cumulated indexes

CA is the largest abstract publication in English and provides comprehensive coverage of the literature in chemistry and chemical engineering.

The following major subject sections are included:

  1. Biochemistry
  2. Organic Chemistry
  3. Macromolecular Chemistry
  4. Applied Chemistry and Chemical Engineering
  5. Physical, Inorganic and Analytical Chemistry

There are author, patent, formula, general subject, chemical substance and ring system indexes in the cumulated volumes.

Beginner's Guide to Chemical Abstracts is available from the University of Waterloo Library.

CA is widely available as an online database on a number of information retrieval systems.

 

Chemisches Zentralblatt
Berlin: Deutsche Chemische Gesellschaft
1(1830)-140(1969) (with varying titles)

Up to 1919 Chemisches Zentralblatt was limited to papers dealing with pure chemistry and it covered German chemical work. From 1919 it covered the world´s periodical literature for pure and applied chemistry.

 

Referativnyi Zhurnal
Moscow: VINITI, 1953-

A comprehensive abstract publication in Russian, which contains a number of separate sections.
There are sixty sections including Khimiya. The corresponding online database is VINITI (All-Union Institute for Scientific and Technical Information) database.

 

Science Citation Index
Philadelphia, Pa: Institute for Scientific Information, 1961-
6 issues per year + annual cumulations and five year cumulations

The citation index is an entirely different type of secondary publication, which allows you to search forwards in time from a known relevant paper. In every field of scholarship, research workers and practitioners cite references to earlier publications related to the work described in their own papers. Through these references (citations) an author expresses subject relationships between the current article and the cited references. A citation index is based on these relationships. It lists publications that have been cited and identifies the sources of these citations. Starting from a known relevant reference, it is possible to trace subsequent articles which refer to the original document, thus leading to more recent literature than the first known item. Citation indexes are designed to facilitate searching forwards in time from a known relevant paper.

The Science Citation Index - SCI - covers over 4 500 journals in a wide range of subjects in the physical and natural sciences, medicine and technology.

SCI consists of three main parts:

Citation Index -
every reference (citation) from the articles in the Source Index, that are being referred to (or cited) during a given period of time is listed in alphabetical sequence under the name of the first author;
Source Index -
an alphabetically arranged author index, giving full bibliographic details of all the source publications; journal articles, reviews, books etc. are indexed by the first author (with references from other authors);
Permuterm Index -
a subject index in which every significant word in the title of every article being indexed is paired with every other significant word in the title and rotated (e.g. AB, BA).

Citation indexes are extremely useful tools for "working forwards" from a highly relevant reference. In using them, it is, however, important to bear in mind the normal pattern of citation. There is a time-lag between the publication of a document and the first reference to it, due to the time taken to assimilate the new information, the time taken to make use of it in further research and the time taken to publish the citing document. The citation index is a powerful tool for information retrieval, in that it is possible to use a cyclic technique, in which the citing document found, together with other papers by the same author(s), may act as new search entry points. ISI provide annual user guides for Science Citation Index, as well as lists of the journals covered. These are arranged alphabetically, by subject and by country of publication. The equivalent database - SciSearch - is available on the Data-Star, DIALOG and STN information retrieval systems, as well as via the Bath Information and Data Services - BIDS - in the United Kingdom.

 

Engineering index: transdisciplinary index to the world´s engineering developments
New York: Engineering Index Inc, 1884/91-

The core areas of engineering covered include civil, mechanical, electrical, chemical, and mining.

 

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