SciFinder Scholar 2007 (for Windows and Mac) Wednesday, 8 August 2007 4:27 pm
Posted by Dongmei in chemistry, database features.add a comment
SciFinder Scholar 2007, the newest version of SciFinder Scholar is here.
I spent a few days last month working with the new version. I loaded the installation file for Windows to the library server. I created a “how to install” page (How to Install SciFinder Scholar 2007 for Windows (for Faculty)) for you to follow along. For those that use SciFinder Scholar Toolbar (for IE), notice that there is a new version of it, you can either install it while you install SciFinder Scholar 2007 (for Windows), or download it from the library server afterwards (check out this page Add-on Software for Windows (IE toolbar, visualization tools to view 3D models)).
For those that using Mac, I generated an archive file of the application package from the disk image file and loaded on the library server. Here’s a very simple instruction on how to install it on your Mac (How to Install SciFinder Scholar 2007 for Mac OS X (for Faculty)).
As far as tutorials go, there are two pdf documents to help you:
Getting Started with SciFinder Scholar 2007 (for Windows)
Getting Started with SciFinder Scholar 2007 (for Mac OS X).
For your convenience, I created a separate page SciFinder Scholar 2007 with all these links on it. If you’re not familiar with SciFinder Scholar, you can learn more about it from the SciFinder Scholar Gateway Page.
There are quite a few new features in this new version, include:
- Categorize references
- Save answers
- Combine answer sets
- Export commercial chemicals records from CHEMCATS ® into Excel
- Explore from substance displays
- Print structures in grid format
- Compatible with Windows Vista™ and Mac OS X
I spent some time this month completely updating the SciFinder Scholar Gateway Page I initially created in 2005 (updated a few times before). Time flies, lots of the contents were related to SciFinder Scholar 2004, which was outdated. All the contents (and links) are now updated, I also changed the page layout a little bit.
Some big (and good) news: Apparently there is a Web version of Sci-Finder in the works, they’ll discuss this in the ACS National Meeting this month. I’m very much looking forward to that Web version, are you?
ChemxSeer: search engine for chemical formulae Wednesday, 1 August 2007 11:17 am
Posted by Dongmei in Internet Resources, chemistry, search engines.add a comment
I blogged about CiteSeer in the past (see CiteSeer, techXtra and computer science literature), a targeted search engine for computer science, info tech, etc. Now, Dr. Giles (one of the developers of CiteSeer) and his students and colleagues at Penn State have developed another targeted search engine for chemistry.
So what is it?
From the news release:
ChemxSeer, the first publicly available search engine designed specifically for chemical formulae, can sort out when “He” refers to helium and not a person more than nine times out of 10, according to the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) researchers who created the tool.
With the new engine, scientists searching for research on CH4 or methane no longer have to wade through search results about Channel 4 or Chapter 4 as ChemxSeer will only return documents with references to the chemical formula. “Results from our search engine are much more relevant than results returned by popular search engines,” Giles said. “It is one of several cyber tools under development in our lab which will enable better access to and sharing of information and data among scientists and scholars.”
One of many interesting features that make-up ChemxSeer is TableSeer.
From the web site:
This tool automatically identifies tables in digital documents and extracts the contents in the cells of the tables. The contents are stored in a queryable table in a database. TableSeer extracts table metadata, and uses a novel ranking function to search for tables relevant to user queries.
(via ResourceShelf)
