Conversations with chemists: information-seeking behavior of chemistry faculty in the electronic age

Science and Technology Libraries

Volumn 21, Issue 3-4, 2001, Pages 5-26

  Flaxbart, David ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN   (United States)

Author keywords

Chemistry faculty; Chemists; Electronic journals; Information seeking behavior

Indexed keywords

DATABASE SYSTEMS; DIGITAL LIBRARIES; ELECTRONIC COMMUNITIES; INFORMATION DISSEMINATION; TEACHING;

CHEMISTRY EDUCATION; ELECTRONIC RESOURCES;

CHEMICAL ENGINEERING;

EID: 0242526955     PISSN: 0194262X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1300/J122v21n03_02     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. Tenopir, Carol and King, Donald W. 2000. Towards electronic journals: realities for scientists, librarians and publishers. (Washington DC: Special Libraries Association).
2. King, Donald W. and Tenopir, Carol. 1999. Using and reading scholarly literature. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) 34:423-77.
3. Williams, Ivor A. 1993. How chemists use the literature. Learned Publishing 6(2):7-14.
4. Brown, Cecilia. 1999. Information seeking behavior of scientists in the electronic information age: astronomers, chemists, mathematicians, and physicists. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 50(10):929-43.
5. Stewart, Linda. 1996. User acceptance of electronic journals: interviews with chemists at Cornell University. College & Research Libraries 57(4):339-49.
6. Stankus, Tony. 1999. The key trends emerging in the first decade of electronic journals in the sciences. Science & Technology Libraries 18(2-3):5-20.
7. Sathe, Nila A., Grady, Jenifer L., and Giuse, Nunzia B. 2002. Print versus electronic journals: a preliminary investigation into the effect of journal format on research processes. Journal of the Medical Library Association 90(2):235-43.
8. Young, Nancy J. and von Seggern, Marilyn. 2001. General information seeking in changing times. Reference & User Services Quarterly 41(2):159-69.
9. There are some possible technical solutions to this problem, but they have not as yet been investigated at the author's institution, for various practical and financial reasons.
10. SciFinder Scholar is the proprietary academic interface to the Chemical Abstracts' suite of databases. These include the CAPLUS file, Chemical Abstracts back to 1907; the Registry file, a database of chemical structures and names containing more than 40 million compound records; the CASREACT file, indexing several million organic reactions back to 1975; and subsidiary files such as CHEMLIST (regulatory information on chemicals) and CHEMCATS (chemical supplier catalogs). The Registry and CASREACT databases are searchable by chemical structure drawing as well as character-string queries. SciFinder is a site-licensed product of Chemical Abstracts Service, a division of the American Chemical Society. Beilstein Crossfire is a proprietary interface to the Beilstein database of organic structure and property information, containing records for over sevea million carbon compounds and seven million organic reactions, with associated physicochemical data and literature references. Beilstein Crossfire is a product of MDL Information Systems, a subsidiary of Elsevier Science. It is made available for academic site licensing via the Beilstein Minerva Consortium in cooperation with the University of Wisconsin. Both SciFinder Scholar and Beilstein Crossfire require special client software to be installed on a user's machine.
11. EndNote allows direct connections to Z39.50-compliant databases and provides a generalized search interface to specific files. Records retrieved can be directly imported to a locally-maintained database and then searched later. A number of chemistry graduate students have indicated a preference for this type of searching interface, and express disappointment at the inability to connect to databases such as Chemical Abstracts Student Edition (FirstSearch) and SciFinder, which are not Z39.50-compliant. The library usually discourages this technique, since it bypasses many of the unique features of native database search interfaces. Records retrieved via native search interfaces can however be imported into bibliographic management software with appropriate filters. EndNote is a product of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). URL: http://www.endnote.com/.
12. Faculty of 1000: http://www.facultyof1000.com/start.asp From the home page: "Faculty of 1000 is a new online research tool that highlights the most interesting papers in biology, based on the recommendations of over 1000 leading scientists." (Viewed Sept. 5, 2002) It is available via personal or institutional subscription. BioMed Central: http://www.biomedcentral.com/ CiteSeer: http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs.
13. National Human Genome Research Institute (NIH-NHGRI): http:/www.genome. gov/ InCyte Yeast Proteome Database:'http://www.incyte.com/sequence/proteome/ databases/YPD.shtml Protein Data Bank: http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/.
14. Brown, "Information seeking behavior of scientists," 931.
15. Fernandez, Leila. 2002. User Perceptions of Current Awareness Services: A Faculty Survey. Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship. Winter. Available at: http://www.istl.org/istl/02-winter/article3.html.
16. Schlembach, Mary C. 2001. Trends in current awareness services. Science & Technology Libraries 20(2-3):121-32.
17. Reference Update: http://www.isinet.com/isi/products/ru/.
18. Davis, Philip M. 2002. Patterns in electronic journal usage: challenging the composition of geographic consortia. College & Research Libraries, in press.
19. Stewart, "User acceptance of electronic journals."
20. In 2001, Austin users downloaded 46,865 articles from the American Chemical Society Web Editions system; 86% of these were in PDF format.
21. Public Library of Science: http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/.
22. For example, the Internet Journal of Chemistry (available at: http://www.ijc.com/) began in 1998 with assistance from ARL/SPARC, intending to demonstrate the capabilities of the new medium. But the number of articles published has declined steadily in each successive year: 38 were published in 1998, but only six in 2002 (through September).