Caveat chemicus: practical guidance to searching Chemical Abstracts

Abstract

Sci-tech information searchers have long recognized Chemical Abstracts (CA) as a premier science and engineering database. In fact, some have called the "chemical" in Chemical Abstracts a restrictive misnomer and suggested that the title might reasonably be changed to Chemistry, Science, and Engineering Abstracts. This high regard stems from CA's broad subject coverage, which extends to the chemical aspects of astronomy, biology, education, engineering, economics, geology, history, mathematics, medicine, and physics. It also denotes CA's extensive format coverage which includes articles from journals and regularly published conference proceedings (73 percent), articles from one-time or first-time conference proceedings (7 percent), dissertations (2 percent), technical reports (1 percent), patents (16 percent), and edited research monograph chapters (1 percent). CA currently carries abstracts for more than 8,000 source items (including Internet documents since 1995) and produced over 700,000 abstracts in 1996(n1). At the end of 1996, over 78 percent (13.2 million) of all the abstracts published since 1907 (16.9 million) were available online(n2).