SciFinder Scholar Guide
Searching | Improving
your results | Displaying
references | Saving & printing |
Full-text | Help
Getting Started
SciFinder Scholar is a powerful bibliographic database
for chemistry and related subjects which allows
searching by chemical structure or reaction,
author, company or organization, patent number
or research
topic. Browsing the tables of contents of journals
is also possible. Like its print equivalent,
Chemical Abstracts, it covers journals, conference
proceedings, patents, dissertations and books
from 1907 to the present day.
The database requires client software loaded onto
your own PC. You will need to sign the CAS
SciFinder user agreement to borrow a disk and
the necessary instructions from the Science
Library.
SciFinder Scholar is available on PCs in the Blommer
Science Library: from the 'Library CD-ROM Network'
select 'Science Databases,' choose 'SciFinder Scholar'.
The license agreement for SciFinder Scholar restricts
the number of concurrent users, so if you cannot
access it, try again at another time. If there
are continuing problems, contact the Science
Library Reference Desk at 7-5651.
Searching
It is possible to search SciFinder Scholar using
chemical substance, reaction, research topic, author,
document identifier, or company name by clicking
on the relevant button on the initial 'Explore' screen.
You can return to these options at any time by clicking on  . The database offers
instructions for each type of search so these are quite straightforward to
use.
Use the 'Chemical substance or reaction' option if you have a chemical name,
formula or structure for which you wish to search. The database searches for
the substances in its 'Registry' database. Once one or more substances matching
your search are found, a record for each is displayed. You can select which
specific substances you want and specify what role you wish them to have in
the literature.
To search for a 'Research topic' enter a phrase
which describes your search topic (e.g. inhibition
of replication of HIV in humans) rather
than a search string or keywords with Boolean operators. The database will
interpret
your phrase and offer you a variety of searches. Plurals and alternative
spellings are automatically retrieved.
Improving
your results
The search results can be further refined or analyzed
to improve the results or to combine the initial
search with further conditions. When literature
references are displayed, clicking on the 'Analyze
or Refine' button offers the option to refine
by research topic, author, company name, year,
document type, and language. The analyze option
allows the results to be grouped by these divisions
and
also by journal title in either alphabetical
order or in order of frequency. Once the references
have been analyzed, you can bring up the results
in selected divisions.
The analyze or refine
options change in relation to the type of
results displayed.
The 'Get Related' button
will search for the records of all references
contained in the
bibliographies of the results or all references
published more recently which cite the results
(cited ref search) or
all substances mentioned in the results.
Displaying references
Once a search has been performed, references are
displayed in brief format. Click on the  button
by each reference to see the full record.
For
literature references, the full record contains
the abstract and further indexing and classification
details. This includes links to the Registry
records for substances mentioned in the reference
and, for
more recent records, to the Scholar records
for references in the bibliography (citations).
For substance Registry records, the full record
includes the formula, all names, some properties
and links
to commercial sources for the substance and
its entry in the regulated chemicals listings.
Saving and printing references
Records can be marked by clicking in the small box.
Either marked records or all records can be
saved to file by clicking on the 'Save To'
button. Use the options button to specify which
records and parts of records to save.
For downloading
references to Endnote use Tagged
Format.
For saving references into a database such as Excel,
use Quoted Format.
For retention of structure
drawings use Rich
Text Format.
For simple
preservation of text use Plain
ASCII Format.
In the same way, records can be printed out by clicking
on the 'Print' button.
Full text
At the moment, to find the full text of books and
journal articles, either in print or on the
Web, it is still necessary to look up each
item in the Library
catalog.
Journal titles, needed to search the Library catalog,
are abbreviated in SciFinder Scholar. To find
out the full title of a journal from an abbreviation,
either see the list of core titles at http://www.cas.org/sent.html or,
for a more comprehensive list, use the copy of Chemical
Abstracts Service Source Index, CASSI, in the Blommer
Science
Library Reference section.
Getting Help
There are various resources available for getting
help with using SciFinder Scholar. You can
obtain help from within SciFinder Scholar at
any time by clicking the Help button to open
the Scholar online guide. In addition to tutorials
from CAS, many university libraries publish
excellent materials on
SciFinder Scholar.
SciFinder Scholar Interactive Tutorial from CAS:
http://www.cas.org/SCIFINDER/SCHOLAR/interact/index.html
SciFinder Scholar Training Material- Leeds
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/library/documents/workbook/scifinder/scholar.pdf
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