1

CHBE 594 Lecture 14Data Bases For The Chemical Sciences

2

Evaluating Databases

Learning to evaluate bibliographic resources is one of the most important skills to develop

It saves time! It focuses your research on the right resource It’s guaranteed to produce the right results It’s all based on resource knowledge

AND: Indexing is how the world works in a computer environment (Google, e-bay)

Choosing your words has never been more critical to the discovery of any information you need, from finding an address to buying through an online auction.

3

Gaining Resource Knowledge

How do you get the information you need to evaluate a database? Consider:

Coverage (years covered) Indexing Number of source materials indexed Is there a bias? Does it affect results? Currency Audience

4

We’ll be looking at these databases: Scopus Current Contents PubMed Beilstein/Gmelin EI Village Google Scholar

…and SciFinder Scholar and Web of Science.

5

What do we use for the benchmark? SciFinder Scholar!

Over 15,000 “source materials” indexes Full text linking to 6,700 journals, From 280 Publishers Indexes the “world’s” chemical literature All languages “All” patents “This year to date,  CAS' weekly input has

reached an average of 20,924 records, compared to 19,551 per week in the record analysis year 2006, an increase of 7%.”

6

You don’t always need the Big Gun Consider the project at hand and weigh

the need against the known attributes of the database

Maybe you only need 10-20 current citations? Try Current Contents!

Maybe you want more engineering-focused literature? Try EI Village!

Medical emphasis? PubMed! You can’t match your needs to a database

until you can evaluate a database.

7

We’ll be looking individually at six indexes to learn how to get the information you need, and what each index offers.

Today’s Indexes: Current Contents Scopus PubMed

8

CURRENT CONTENTS

Coverage includes 8,000 journals and 2,000 books. Tests showed some of the books indexed in CC are not in SFS.

Approximately 300 chemistry journals which are selected based on Impact Factor.

Articles, editorials, commentaries and meeting abstracts. No patent coverage (That’s in Web of Science).

DEMO!

9

SCOPUS

Fairly new addition to the indexing world, based on Elsevier’s dominance of the science publishing world

Great coverage information found at http://www.info.scopus.com/ 15,000 peer-reviewed journals from more than

4,000 international publishers, including coverage of:

Over 1,000 Open Access journals 500 Conference Proceedings Over 600 Trade Publications Over 125 Book Series

10

SCOPUS

Scopus also indexes web sites and patents

It includes all of PubMed, similar to SFS

DEMO search: TiO2-Al2O3 Different from Current Contents –

additional sources from web and patents.

11

PUBMED

PubMed Coverage PubMed provides access to bibliographic

information that includes MEDLINE, as well as: The out-of-scope citations (e.g., articles on

plate tectonics or astrophysics) from certain MEDLINE journals, primarily general science and chemistry journals, for which the life sciences articles are indexed for MEDLINE.

Citations that precede the date that a journal was selected for MEDLINE indexing.

Some additional life science journals that submit full text to PubMedCentral and receive a qualitative review by NLM.

12

PubMed

The database contains citations from 1950 to the present, with some older material.

Approximately 5,000 journals published in the United States and more than 80 other countries have been selected and are currently indexed for MEDLINE. A distinctive feature of MEDLINE is that the records are indexed with NLM's controlled vocabulary, the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®).

Remember PubMed is already a part of both SFS and Scopus.

DEMO!

13

Test Drive an Index

Sample Searches Author (author index displayed) Keyword Full Text What else does it offer that’s different?

Examining a Full Record Cross Reference Linking Keyword What else is in there that’s different?

14

Test Drive and Index

Coverage and scope This information is often only found

through a Google search and is not part of the actual database searching information provided.

Choosing a Database More often than not, that means more

than one for the most complete search. Which ones will depend upon your

topic, your needs, timeframe and willingness to experiment.