Engineering & Mathematics Notebook

Friday, 08 January 2010

Updates to ACS Journals

The American Chemical Society (ACS) has made some recent additions to its online publications.

Through its Division of Chemical Education, ACS now offers the Journal of Chemical Education (JCE) as part of its regular searchable journals collection. Introduced in 1924, JCE is considered one of the premier journals worldwide in chemistry education.  It is a major source for information on chemistry education trends, classroom and curriculum ideas, and reviews of books and products (as such it provides helpful guidance on chemistry-related textbooks). One advantage of its migration to the ACS Journals platform is that its content can be searched upon alongside ACS’s many other publications. In addition, the articles can be viewed in high-quality PDF formats with links to other ACS articles and citations can be downloaded in RIS format for use in bibliographic software such as EndNote, RefWorks, and Zotero.

Other news from ACS includes its participation in EurekaAlert, an online newsletter started by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to reach the rapidly expanding research community in China.  And from the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) comes a new series of video abstracts, which are summaries of recently published JACS articles, presented by the authors themselves. The intent of the videos is to offer a quick introduction for both researchers and others to a key idea or development. 
This series is still in beta; updates can be subscribed to via iTunes and other podcast software.

Posted in Chemical & Biological Engineering, Collections News, Engineering, Journal Watch

Saturday, 22 August 2009

Keeping Track of Chemical Compounds

CAS, the American Chemical Society’s division that produces the CAS registry, just announced that on September 7 it expects to register the 50 millionth unique chemical substance. Only last November, CAS registered its 40 millionth substance (a derivative of azulenobenzofuran). Per CAS, it registered its 10 millionth compound in 1990, after 33 years, and now registers approximately 12,000 new substances daily.  That means that, at the current exponential rate of registry additions, we could be celebrating the 60 millionth substance by the start of 2010.

With such an explosion – figuratively speaking – of new substance registrations, having effective systems for identifying, tracking and them becomes critical in order to facilitate research. The CAS Registry Number System is among the most prominent such systems for chemicals substances. PubChem, from the National Institutes of Health, has its own Chemical ID number system as does International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), which helped to develop the International Chemical Identifier (InChI) system. Unlike the CAS system, the PubChem and IUPAC systems are non-proprietary. Just last month, IUPAC announced that it has established the InChi Trust to further the development of its open source algorithm so chemical engineers and other chemistry researchers and professionals may expect to see increased InChis alongside the CAS numbers and the prospect of interesting ways to link substances using these unique identifiers.

Posted in Chemical & Biological Engineering, Engineering, Research Tools

Tuesday, 28 July 2009

Ready for 2010, the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics arrives

For decades, and through 89 editions, the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics has been a basic search tool for physical property data. Its many tables list data on both chemical compound and physical properties as well as literature references for related information. Recently the 90th edition (for 2010) — all 2,804 pages of it — arrived at the Tisch Reference Desk and, as wtih previous new editions, offers additional topics. For this edition, new topics include the solubility parameters of polymers, data on major earthquakes, and nobel laureates in chemistry and physics, while several major chapters have been updated.

While the current edition comes in print only, the previous (89th) edition is available online through the Tufts catalog. This version has not only Acrobat PDF facsimiles of the text but enables searching on structures and parameters such as the CAS Registry number, molecular weight, substance name, and formula. In addition, many data tables are presented in an interactive format which enables filtering, sorting, and exporting into Excel tables.

While the 89th and 90th editions represent the state of the discipline, those with a historical bent can appreciate the original first edition, published in 1913, when CRC Press went by the name of the Chemical Rubber Company and had the idea of publishing a 116 page tome entitled Handbook of Chemistry and physics : a ready-reference pocket book of chemical and physical data compiled from the most recent authoritative sources. This facsimile edition is available in the Tisch Book Stacks.

Posted in Chemical & Biological Engineering, Engineering