CAS extends access to additional research from early twentieth century

Citation

Blake, M. (2004), "CAS extends access to additional research from early twentieth century", The Electronic Library, Vol. 22 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/el.2004.26322fag.001

CAS extends access to additional research from early twentieth century

Compiled by Monica Blake

CAS extends access to additional research from early twentieth centurywww.cas.org

CAS has expanded its “Scientific Century” project by making thousands of additional early twentieth century articles from American Chemical Society (ACS) journals and others available online. Planned for release in September, the enhanced content will enable researchers to access more than 7,000 additional records back to 1900, including publications even older than the beginning of Chemical Abstracts (CA). CAS announced the expanded access during the ACS National Meeting being held in Philadelphia in August 2004.

“We have learned from the scientists and information specialists who rely on our information services that ‘more is better’, and literature from an earlier era can contain findings highly relevant to current research”, said Dr Matthew Toussant, CAS Vice President, Editorial Operations. “Now we have gone even beyond the traditional coverage of CA to make thousands of published studies easily accessible online”.

Included in the newly added information accessible through STN services, SciFinder and SciFinder Scholar is material from ACS journals and other sources:

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  Journal of the American Chemical Society – more than 1,500 records, including abstracts for journal articles and summaries for book reviews;

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  Journal of Physical Chemistry – more than 5,200 records, including abstracts of articles published in the journal plus other “abstracts of interest” to the journal (i.e. published in other sources of the time); and

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  more than 400 documents of lasting importance published from 1900-1912 in various sources and not originally covered in CA. These are landmark publications cited in CA/CAplus files since 1998.

Among the early literature studies that continue to be cited in more recent publications are a paper on radioactive substances by Marie and Pierre Curie in Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires des Seances de l’Academie des Sciences (1902); a study by Emil Fischer on amino acids, polypeptides, and proteins in Berichte der Deutschen Chemischen Gesellschaft (1906); and a paper by Victor Grignard regarding organometallic combinations of magnesium and their application to the synthesis of alcohols and hydrocarbons, from Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires des Séances de l’Académie des Sciences (1900).

Since CAS announced the Scientific Century project in 2001, more than 3.5 million documents from the first half of the twentieth century have been added to the online CA and CAplus files. In total, 23 million records for journal articles, patents, symposia, books, and other documents of scientific interest are available in these databases, which are accessible though SciFinder, SciFinder Scholar and the STN services, including STN Easy and STN on the web.