CHM 298 Assignment #12 (Due Friday, April 7 at 5:00)

Introduction to Chemical Abstracts

The purpose of this assignment (and the following one) will be to familiarize yourself with searching chemical abstracts, which is perhaps the most comprehensive index of chemistry-relevant primary literature.

Unlike other online databases, chemical abstracts bills the university for the actual amount of time spent online. Therefore you need to have some idea of how to use chemical abstracts before logging in and attempting any searches. Therefore, your assignment this week is to read the student manual on using chemical abstracts, which is available here http://info.cas.org/ACAD/cover.html. After reading the manual, briefly answer each of the following questions.

Note: the above manual is rather lengthy, so plan accordingly.

1. Briefly explain the difference between the "AND" and "OR" operators in conducting a search. What would be the difference between searching for "carbon or hydrogen" and "carbon and hydrogen"

2. Within chemical abstracts, each record is displayed in fields. Each field is represented by a two-letter code. What information is contained in each of the following fields:

AN
TI
AU
CS

3. Briefly explain the difference between searching for "carbon", "carbon?", and "?carbon".

4. Briefly explain the difference between searching for "carbon (W) hydrogen", "carbon (A) hydrogen", "carbon (S) hydrogen", and "carbon (L) hdyrogen".

5. Suppose that you wanted to search for articles by the author "John Doe." What command would you use?

6. Explain what commands you would use to narrow a search to publications within a specific year or range of years.