The Chemical Abstract Service, located right here in Columbus across the street from the the Schottenstein Center, is both a physical clearinghouse for chemical records and a vast electronic database for the use of scientists and researchers of all kinds. The Service includes not only information about chemistry but about biochemistry, chemical education, all branches of related science and the teaching of it. It includes 15 million document records and more than 21 million substance records, which are accessible via the Web and also through SciFinder, CAS's commercially available software program.The CAS main website is a good starting point for the many services it offers. Accessible from this site are CAS's files of chemical reactions, commercially available chemicals, regulated chemicals and patented chemical and chemical processes.
SciFinder is a fabulous program that's saved me probably months worth of time over the years. Traditionally, if one wanted to find literature on Reaction X, you had to go to the library and page through the CAS hardbound Abstracts Index. This would give you an Abstract Number, which you'd then have to go and locate in the Abstracts themselves. Only then would you know whether or not the article itself (located somewhere in the stacks upstairs, usually) was even relevant to your search. With SciFinder, a software program that operates over the Internet via a direct connection to CAS's database, all you need do is type in your queries and it does the searches for you, retrieving abstracts for you. You can search by keyword, compound structure (there is a chemical drawing application within the software), chemical formula, author, publication date...the only hitch is that it only goes back to about 1981. The trick with SciFinder is to find a site that's licensed to use it and actually has the software.
The only drawback to SciFinder is that it only gives you the abstract. To get the actual article you still have to go to the stacks. This web-based database includes the actual texts of the journals electronically. This service includes many journals, not just chemistry-related. Most links connect you to the website where the journal is found...unfortunately most of them require a subscription to the journal in question to access the articles, but it's still useful for the abstracts, which are available for anyone to view. The other downside is that the journals archived here are quite recent, most of them only from 1996 or newer.
STN Web is another service of CAS and yet another way to search relevant databases. It's a paid-subscription site that searches over 200 databases in topic-clustered groups. It's quite powerful if you've got the access.
