Utilization of SciFinder Scholar at an Undergraduate Institution

Abstract

Undergraduate science educators have reported that students should know how to locate and use chemical information (1). Articles pertaining to the use of online resources for this purpose have appeared in this Journal (2-12). The American Chemical Society guidelines for a certified degree have made it clear that students "must learn how to retrieve specific information from the enormous and rapidly expanding chemical literature" (13). The guidelines also state that "it is essential that students gain experience with online, interactive computer files" (13). One of the goals of Butler University's chemistry program is to provide a comprehensive education and we believe, even though we are a primarily undergraduate institution, that this includes understanding and using all available research tools.Introducing undergraduate students to the chemical literature early and exposing them to it often is a challenge faced at all teaching institutions. Traditional undergraduate curricula that include chemical literature generally do it in one of three ways: as a formal chemical literature course (2-5), by integrating literature searching into an existing course (6-8), or by general undergraduate usage (9-11). The Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) online searching products used in the cited courses were STN Mentor (2); STN through the Academic Plan including CA (bibliographic file), the Registry File (structures), CAOLD (bibliographic file pre-1967), LCA (Learning CA file), LREG (Learning Registry File), and LCASReact (Learning reactions) (3,4,6,8,10); Dialog (5,8,11); and Dialog Classroom Instruction Program (CIP) (7). Until recently, Butler University was an extensive user of STN and Dialog for all our online searching needs. Since January 1, 2001, we have used SciFinder Scholar, a product available to teaching and research institutions since 1997 (14-16 ), in our teaching and research (17 ). This online searching tool has several advantages over other products as outlined in this report.The use of online search resources at primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs), is even more challenging because resources at these institutions are often limited. There can be a significant cost when large numbers of students perform CAS online searching, or search time through STN and Dialog products may be restricted. In fact, two papers reported that searches were performed during off-peak hours (9,11). With SciFinder Scholar, we have significantly increased students' access to CAS online services and have allowed them to become active partners in their own explorations of the chemical literature database.

Predicting human plasma protein binding of drugs using plasma protein interaction QSAR analysis (PPI‐QSAR)

“…The 2D structures of 65 drugs were searched in the SciFinder Scholar database and the saved mol files were imported into TSAR 3.3. Finally, the corresponding relationship between the name and structure of each drug was manually inspected and, when needed, corrected.…”

Fragment-Based Ligand Discovery Using Protein-Observed 19F NMR: A Second Semester Organic Chemistry CURE Project

“…In the first week, students were introduced to SciFinder Scholar. Various SciFinder activities have been published in this journal over the years, − and we adapted the approach and activities of Swoger and Helms by changing the search terms to be relevant to elements of this project. The final SciFinder activity was for students to find a literature precedent for the synthesis of a molecule similar to GAMLE1, as well as a precedent for making each of the materials needed for the synthesis.…”

Teaching Information Retrieval in the Chemistry Curriculum

“…This paper does not make an attempt to give a complete bibliography on this subject. Instead it refers to Carol Carr's annotated bibliography (Carr, 2000) of the time period of 1993-1998 and lists articles which have been published since then 2 (Ricker & Thompson, 1999;Wilk & Wiger, 2000;Murov, 2001;Ridley, 2001a;Ridley, 2001b;Zass, Braendle, & Bizzizero, 2001;O'Reilly, Wilson, & Howes, 2002;Christensen, Franzyk, Frolund, Jaroszewski, Staerk, & Vedso, 2002;Gallagher & Adams, 2002;Landolt, 2002;Jackson, 2002;Porter, Lee, & Wiggins, 2002).…”